Oh Good, She's Trying to Stand!/ Oh God, She's Trying to Stand

It begins

The other week, two friends of ours in the neighborhood stopped by to drop off a bowl we’d brought over to their house for a recent cookout. Their son– three months younger than Juniper yet much, much bigger and stronger– was with them.

“He stood up without any help today!” his mother said. Pretty exciting stuff. The giant, strong baby– whose name, appropriately, is Hugo– was grinning from his carrier as if he’d just won a baby Nobel prize.

The last time I’d seen their little guy, just days before, he was moving around his play area in a manner similar to Gollum from Lord of the Rings– one foot flat on the ground, one shin down as if crawl-galloping, both hands smacking the play mat one after the other. Meanwhile, Juniper sat watching him, casually using her hands to grab her feet and hyper-extend her knees one at a time, content to be a spectator, like somebody at a track meet doing yin yoga in the infield.

My daughter’s complete disinterest in crawling, standing, and walking was starting to worry me. I know that there’s a huge time frame in which standing can develop that is considered healthy; I just wanted to get this one thing out of the way so that I didn’t have to worry anymore that there was still a possibility that she might need extra intervention.

My husband, a coach at heart, would hold her upright sometimes, with mixed results. Sometimes she’d grab onto the back of the couch or side of the table and hold herself in a standing position until her feet slid away from each other, sometimes she’d lean unsteadily in a semi-standing position, but other times she just didn’t seem to care and would kneel down immediately.

I relayed my anxieties to another friend, who said something that calmed me down: “How many adults do you know can’t walk because their parents didn’t try hard enough to teach them how?”

Okay, good point.

Besides, once she started walking, we’d have to figure out some way to contain her.

So I chose to focus instead on cherishing this wonderful time when my baby is cute, funny, and engaging, and doesn’t yet have the physical capability to run around seeking out ways to injure herself in my home.

I thought I’d figured out a pretty smart parenting hack when I realized that I could put her down in a laundry basket with a random kitchen spoon and she’d be safely occupied for at least as long as it took me to use the bathroom. I’d set her up in a basket in the doorway of the bathroom, and she’d just sit there waving the spoon around and smacking it on the sides of the basket, perfectly content to entertain herself.

In her basket, I could keep an eye on her while being hands-off enough to do basic chores. Nobody would start crying or try to eat a ball of lint. It was great.

I also realized that because she wasn’t pulling herself up to stand, I could use the same basket as a baby container during her (almost) nightly bath. It was the perfect transitional technology between her baby tub and sitting up on her own in the tub without any bumpers or railings.

For a couple of weeks, this was how things were when I was in charge of the baby: Set baby down. Put several toys near enough to baby that she could scoot herself to them while sitting on her butt. And then sit down near her with my laptop and I’d get to half-work; I’d respond to emails or read the news or work on some writing ideas or procrastinate by going down an internet rabbit hole about mysteries around Paula Abdul’s 1992 plane crash.

Until last night.

Rather than being content to sit and play, all she wanted to do was grab onto the sides of the basket and pull herself up. It was as though she’d attended a particularly rousing seminar on The Power of Standing and couldn’t wait to try out what she’d learned in the most dangerous possible context. I had to keep one hand on her and one hand on the basket to keep her from flipping the whole setup over into the tub.

Once we’d survived that without anybody getting hurt, I let the basket air dry before putting it back in the laundry room. Its days of being a helpful little pen for a non-ambulatory-curious baby were over.

The era of standing– and falling– has begun. I got what I wanted. I’m terrified.

Image via Shutterstock