8/27/2000 - Week 33 - 7 Months, 2 Weeks

August 27, 2000
Week 33 - 7 Months, 2 Weeks

Turns out, your kids get some of your traits. Alex is one of the most focused babies you’ll ever see. He spends hours every day, doing one thing; he is learning to walk. I suspect this ability to focus on a single thing for hours on end comes from both his mother and father. Writing software is basically an exercise in focus. You spend most of the day, sitting, working on a single problem. All other things are pushed out of your concentration. This is exactly how Alex is about walking.

Alex started to pull himself up on the couch just after we moved into our new house. It’s really early for a baby to pull himself up; he was just a few days over six months old. In fact, he really wasn’t even crawling yet. Something he does with some skill now. Crawling is how Alex spends the other half of his waking day; crawling around the kitchen, pounding his toys against the ground and putting everything he finds into his mouth. These are simple sidelights to the real show, Alex’s raison d’être, walking. He has a single-minded focus on this one task.

It’s been interesting watching him learn this skill. When he first figured out how to pull himself up, he actually practiced falling backward on his well-padded behind. He would take a good fall every couple of hours. When he did fall, and he wasn’t tired, he would pick himself up and pull himself back to a standing position. The first thing to learn was controlled falling. Last week he started something new. He wants to hold a toy in his hand while he is standing. This is a pretty difficult task because Alex needs two hands to pull himself up. He spent most of the week working on bending down, keeping his balance and snagging a toy off the ground. Now, he will stand for hours and pick up a toy then drop it, then pick it up, etc.

As Julie’s Mom has pointed out, all of this focus has its dark side. As Barbara noticed, Alex goes from 0 to 10 in seconds. One minute he is playing, the next he is crying up a storm. We think it’s because he spends so much time focusing on things, that when he finally realizes he is hungry, he is really hungry. (All of this sounds a lot like Mike, his Grandmother Sharon’s brother.)

The big test, one Alex does when he is really brave, is letting completely go of all support. Testing the legs against gravity alone. He does this, but he hasn’t yet learned to catch himself when he falls, so this test always results in a fall of some type. Usually, right back on his behind. If we “old people” fell like that once, we couldn’t walk for days. Alex does it all day long. He does have short legs, however. Today Alex managed a free-stand, no support, for six seconds. I was impressed. We are taking bets when he will walk for real. Certainly it will be after he is eight months old (September 12^th), but maybe before nine months.