look out world: here comes baby!

Yesterday, Anastasia started crawling.

Ok, so it wasn't exactly crawling--more like Army crawling, or scootching on her elbows and stomach as she pushes forward with her feet. But either way, she's definitely mobile now. I can measure her progress in feet instead of inches.

The funny thing is she's been able to move herself a little bit for a while now, and I don't know when it all came together. I discovered it yesterday because I left her by herself for a minute in the bedroom while I did something in the living room. I left her in the middle of our bed (which is just a mattress on the floor), happily playing with my library book. I could hear her making happy sounds when I was in the other room, so I knew she was fine. When the happy sounds suddenly changed to crying (as they often do at this age, very suddenly, for no apparent reason), I immediately rushed back into the bedroom to see what was wrong.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered her not in the middle of the bed, where I'd left her, but several yards away in the middle of the bedroom floor.

I wasn't worried about the fact that she'd gotten off the bed; she's rolled off it several times before, and I have the floor all around it lined with pillows and towels to soften the fall. The fact that she'd traveled so far did surprise me, though, because she's never done that before. But mostly it was the fact that she wasn't on her side as though she'd been rolling; she was on her belly, and it was obvious that she's been dragging herself along. She'd finally figured out crawling.

Naturally, after I picked her up and comforted her, I tried to get her to do it again. I set her down on the bed, and sure enough, she immeidately started dragging herself along, scootching with her elbows and knees, her head up high and a huge, goofy grin on her face. But when I went to grab the video camera so I could capture the magic moment on tape, she stopped. Of course. She's a little performer--she loves to do tricks when people are watching--but she hasn't figured out yet that the camera is fun to perform for, too.