Little EC has demonstrated a pattern, almost since the beginning, that illustrates how she learns new skills. The first time I noticed it was when she first put her fist to her mouth in a seemingly-intentional way. Fist in mouth, suck for a bit. Then she didn’t do it again for weeks. Sometime later, she began the intentional practice that I’ve described before.

She did this with rolling over. Her first success was followed by weeks of not trying very hard. At some point, she picked up again and started rolling over whenever she felt like it. Most recently, she has started holding her own bottle while eating, in an intentional and insistent way. I was pretty sure this was coming, because…you guessed it…a month or so ago she held her own bottle during one feeding, quite by accident.

It is as if she is doing random things with her body, and every now and then she randomly does something that seems worthwhile to her. Then she has to ruminate over it for some time, after which she figures out just how she did that thing in the first place and can replicate it.

If I use this as a guide, then, I’m going to say she’s at least a month away from crawling, because she just the other day inched a little bit forward while reaching hard for a toy. She may start moving in the walker a little earlier, because it was last week that she got her first accidental steps in. So we’re looking at some perhaps serious progress near the end of Month 6.