Crawling

Edith began crawling a week ago, and has been completely ungovernable ever since. I wouldn’t mind so much, except for some reason, her most intense desire is to crawl directly into the little corners of rooms and scrabble around there, and I now realize that these are areas our housecleaner habitually misses.

Every morning, Edith boldly dashes to the edge of the carpeted playroom, and rocks back and forth screwing up her courage, before launching onto the hardwood of the hall. This tickles me because my pet rabbit used to to the exact same thing when at the threshold of hard flooring. Edith then goes a bit further each day down the dark hall or into the kitchen (usually to explore another cranny and canvass it for dead bugs and old food crumbs) before getting sick of it and calling for me to come fetch her.

When I get ready for the day, I used to park Edith in a bounce chair in the bathroom and she happily played there while I brushed my teeth and got dressed. She rejected that solution some time ago, but I was able to park her on a quilt just on the other side of the door. Now, though, she wants to crawl all around the bathroom, which is arguably the least clean room in the house. I don’t want to tell on myself — things are clean here! Very clean! But I shed like a barrel-full of scared cats and when she crawls around on the bathroom floor, she gets covered in my discarded hair, plus, I just find it viscerally unsettling for a baby to rub her face on the floor in the bathroom. I realize logically it is probably not any dirtier than any other floor in the house, but I have a natural aversion to it that Edith simply does not share.

So I have been starting her off in various corners of the bedroom and then racing through my morning ablutions, attempting to beat her progress towards me. It doesn’t work. No matter where the starting line, she zips into the bathroom and posts up at my feet, triumphant, before I can get one contact lens in. Yesterday she attempted to access the shower drain through the glass shower door and banged her head against the invisible barrier over and over until she howled in frustration (she might not be MIT-bound, which is fine! It’s fine.).

I’ve ordered an immense playpen which will fill up most of the living room. We’ll see how that works.