"Oh he's almost there!"
"It's going to happen so soon!"
"He's so close! I bet it happens this weekend!"
I try not to pay too much attention to milestones. I certainly don't care if they happen early or late, and it doesn't bother me when another baby checks something off before we do. I know it will all happen eventually. If anything, I usually tell myself whatever it is will happen way later, so that I'm pleasantly surprised when it does happen.
However.
This crawling thing? It's just so weird. I don't care that he's not crawling, and I am enjoying the time where he's not mobile yet, I really am. It's just that he's been SO CLOSE for so long, it's become a thing. He clearly could do it. He can move all over the place when he's not paying attention. He just doesn't. And because he's SO CLOSE, it gets talked about a lot. By everyone. And they convince me it's going to happen RIGHT NOW. So I take my camera out and film, and then two weeks later we're in the same spot. I'm not even kidding when I say we've been in this pattern for two months now.
So now I've just decided he'll be walking before he crawls and have stopped paying attention. Which if you know how the jinx of the internet works, means he'll start the day after I publish this post. Or he'll start at the most inconvenient time. When we're traveling and nothing is baby-proofed.
Either way, I'm going to stop talking about it. Ignore it completely. Right, that's a thing I can do?
A whole month. A month of cuddles and smelling your head, and staring into your eyes. It’s a different experience, knowing you’re my last baby. It makes every cuddle just a little more precious, and makes me wish to get through these rough days less. Actually, they’re really not that rough.
There’s definitely some benefits to being the third child. You definitely have more relaxed parents than your siblings had. E had nervous new parents and G had parents who were figuring out how to parent more than one child. You have parents who have been there, done that, and so not much makes us nervous, which means not much upsets you. You are the calmest baby we’ve had. The vacuum can be running, your siblings can be screaming, and you can be sleeping.