Going Mobile
I read Tim Bray's latest with some amusement; 11 month old Isabella has also become increasingly mobile in the last month. Unlike Tim's daughter, Iz loves being on her tummy. Before she was crawling, she would simply arch her back; when I'd roll her onto her back, she'd immediately roll back onto her tummy. I can't imagine how sore she must be after spending all day like that. Even now, she only "army crawls". She has amazing upper body strength, hauling herself along without much help from her lower body, primarily using her left arm. Izzy is a champion scavenger, and whenever she finds a prize on the floor, she scoots along with her left arm only, her right raised high in the air as she calls out in triumph in her baby language. It's funny, but the sound she seems to associate with excitement is "Ca", which is what she says when she sees one of our cats. It makes me wonder if she's associating the sound to a feeling and not an object. It's pretty amazing watching infants develop language. One day, they just start talking.
In any case, I've mostly completed the baby-proofing now. I've been installing various gates over the last month, but the last thing was to put a gate at the bottom of the stairs; Izzy had taken to climing the stairs. She could do three or four by herself, closely supervised, and could do all 8 steps to the first landing with a bit of assistance. So up goes the gate, which took a bit of engineering, but the gate is now installed.
The other part of this is electrical protections. I'm still amazed at how many outlets they put into a new house - when I went to inventory our outlets, I was finding ones I never knew existed. And the locations! One next to the front door, then another a foot away on the other side of a 6 inch partial wall. No doubt due to some building code, but really a totally strange setup. I used to think most of that electrical proofing was a bit overdone, but then a couple weeks ago, I delivered myself a nice sting while installing a dimmer switch - the breaker was off for the switch I was working on, but I had forgotten that one of the switches in that box was on a different circuit, and got an arc onto my screwdriver and up my arm. Just enough of a reminder to get those outlets covered.