Sarah has been on the go almost since the day she was born. She decided on Christmas Eve 2004 that she was ready to walk and no matter how much I tried to persuade her that at ten months and 12 days she was much much much too young to be a walker, she took off without me and never looked back. In the photo on the right she is moments away from taking her first steps. She let go of the ottoman and took four steps toward the stairs which she then proceeded to climb. The climbing - I'm pretty sure that's why I missed photographing her first steps. She was a fast and fearless climber long before she was an adventurous walker. As a side note, we baby-proofed our house like crazy before Owen was born only to discover that we really didn't need to. He was content playing with his toys or with us and never tried to do dangerous things like put his finger in a light socket or scale the cabinets to get into the prescription medications or open drawers and pull out sharp knives. By the time Sarah was born we had moved to a new house and after wasting all that time and money baby-proofing for our son, we assumed that we didn't need to baby proof the house for our daughter. Oh sure, we put in the obligatory outlet covers, but baby gates and cabinet locks and bumpers? Not this time! We naively believed that those crazy safety precautions were for all those overprotective first time parents. Yeah, we were wrong. See that photo below? It was taken on Christmas morning. Our sweet baby went from taking four steps on Christmas Eve to walking just about wherever she wanted to go on Christmas day. It's not that she wasn't mobile before the walking - she was a crawling fiend - but the walking meant her hands were free to open cabinets and drawers more quickly and pull herself up on taller things and generally increase her range of mayhem. Mobility, thy name is Sarah.*
What's in here?
Lucky for me I can
walk over and find out for myself now.
Please don't offer to help me,
it won't go well for you.
Why am I waxing all nostalgic about Sarah's first steps this Christmas season? It's because at Sarah's orthopedic appointment on December 17th, the doctor told Sarah that with her new walking boot she could begin putting weight on her foot on December 24th - eight years to the day that she took her very first steps. It's made me more than a little bit sentimental. And so it was on Christmas Eve, Sarah took her first crutch assisted steps on her left leg since "the incident" in late November. She quickly went from slow tentative steps with her left leg to almost crutch running by Christmas Day. She's now gotten so fast crutch walking that I have hustle to keep up with her when we're out and about. A mobile Sarah is still a happy Sarah.
Christmas morning, climbing
the steps with her
American Girl Wheelchair
and broken legged McKenna doll in tow.
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* I've been looking through my journals this holiday season and I came across the following entry from December 28, 2006: "We have decided to try to get her into a gymnastics class after the holidays. She loves to do gymnastic-like things like flip upside down, hang from the kitchen table, walk on her toes, twirl around, launch herself off the furniture and climb up the outside of the stairs. She has no fear! And when she sits on the floor she always sits with her toes pointed - it's very cute. She just seems like she would love it."
