a happy crawler...tunnel vision etc

12.5 months notes:

dd seems to really enjoy her gymboree classes now. at her level there is a lot of climbing up and down obstacle courses and crawling through tunnels (barrels of different sizes and lengths). in the beginning she would balk at crawling through the tightest tunnels, which were a bit darker and narrower. but no longer. she seems happy to crawl through anything so long as there is a prize (e.g. a ball) or sometimes just to get to the other side to me!

at gymboree there is one 'game' for the tots that involves all of them standing up and rolling a large, long 'log' from one side of the room to the other. i can see that dd is now much more stable on her feet and can keep pace with the rolling whereas before she would sometimes trip because she only took tentative steps.

at home she does lots of cruising along the furniture (our tv screen is coated with her little finger prints) and likes to pull herself up to one of our major electrical appliance to press buttons (e.g. the different ones on the desk fan, dvd and video player, etc.). all quite scary and i dread to think what she will get up to when she starts walking on her own and running everywhere. yikes. (thankfully we were given a child harness by dd's step-cousin, and i am sure it will be very handy when the time comes.)

much to my dismay, my once chubby little michelin baby is no more...she's lost quite a lot of weight since she insisted on self-feeding and crawling lots. one of the mothers at gymboree was surprised to hear how light dd is now, even though as she put it, "she looks so fleshy." i had to inform her that dd is small-boned hence even though she doesn't weigh a lot, there is still a lot of 'meat' on her bones.