Progress

Silje is delayed in the physical stuff. She's really nowhere close to being ready to crawl and she's getting close to a year old now. Part of the reason for this is that she has absolutely no upper body strength. She has always hated tummy time. If you put her on her tummy she would get quite angry and stay angry for quite awhile after you took her out of it. So we haven't been particularly good about her doing it. I also wasn't sure what the point was - if she was just going to lie there and yell and not try to do anything else she wasn't getting much out of it.

We've discovered recently though that she doesn't seem to mind being put into the crawl position. She doesn't get all that mad about it. But she is so weak in her upper body that she can't maintain it. She will collapse after awhile and has a hard time getting her head all the way up to look forward while in the position. But we've been putting her in the position for about a week now and she is getting stronger. She can hold the position longer now than before.

She also likes to stand. She can't pull herself up, but she will hold onto something for awhile if you put her into the position. We stay right there because she has a tendency to just let go and we don't want her to get hurt. I was beginning to wonder if she would walk before she would crawl. But now that she is building her upper body strength and doesn't mind the crawl position I think she'll crawl first.

Although she is behind on the physical stuff, she is apparently advanced on the mental stuff. We had conferences at school recently and her teacher said she was more advanced in some areas than many of the kids in the 12-18 month room. She does surprise me with the things she does sometimes. For instance I was done feeding her the other day and I placed a rag on her high chair tray and stepped away for a minute to rinse out her dish and I turned bag and she was wiping her mouth with the rag. She tries to put her own socks and shoes on. She has been trying to help me stuff diapers for awhile. It amazes me that she understands what all of these things are for - she just doesn't have the ability to do them quite yet. I guess at school she does stuff like differentiate between shapes and understands that the circle goes in the round hole and the square goes in the square hole. She's not very good at actually getting them, but she tries.

Anyway, she also has a pretty good sense of humor already. She likes to make faces to make us laugh. She has a few that she likes to do. A few are hard to catch on camera because she does them quickly. But I did get one of them.