Creepy Crawly

We have officially entered into the next phase of baby-hood. Sydney is crawling.

At first it was a just a few hesitant missteps before falling back on the much more reliable "commando crawl" which involves slithering forward on your belly lizard style to get to your desired object. Then it became more insistent. Now it is what Sydney does best.

Now we live in constant fear of what might be on the floor or what Sydney might walk into. We are not neat people, but we've cleared out the spaces the baby crawls in as best we can and we're becoming intimately acquainted with our vacuum, broom and mop. We've gotten down on our hands and knees and scrutinized the rooms from a baby eye's view, and tried to put ourselves in the mindset of a fearless but clueless 8 month old, discovering electrical cords and outlets for the first time, interesting items in the wide cracks of our pine floors, and completely uninterested in basic physical concepts such as gravity.

Even so, she still manages to find and chew on things which the more mature of us do not consider edible. So far we've pulled the following out of her protesting mouth:

moss
scotch tape
dog hair
paper
unidentified fuzz
flower petals
half a dead lightening bug
a burr

That's just the things we've found before they were swallowed. Who knows what's made it down into her digestive tract. So far, nothing obvious has been spit out the other side but I fully expect to see, reconstituted in way I've never seen before, inedible, inorganic items which have followed the same path as all the other stuff that goes into her mouth.

The crawling has also made us both uneasy enough that it invades our sleep. I sat up the other night and asked wildly where the baby was. My husband, woken up from his own uneasy sleep, assured me she was in her own bed. "Did you put her back?" I asked, because I had been dreaming that she was in bed with us but kept crawling away. My husband was silent for a time but decided to humor me. "Yes," he said, " I put her back." So far she's been unable to escape from the crib or the playpen but I suspect it is only a matter of time before those monkey instincts kick in. She'll progress from crawling to swinging from the trees before I know it.