...One Giant Leap for Baby-kind

Ava has been really clingy lately. The cause is probably multifactorial. She has been cutting teeth recently (we're up to five now) and may or may not be cutting more. She had to stop taking her third antibiotic for her third ear infection in a month due to diarrhea (we love us some diaper blow-outs). She has an appointment to get her ears checked on Monday. If she STILL has an ear infection we're going to have to see an ENT (Ear, Nose, and Throat) doctor about possibly getting tubes in her ears. You'd think with all the ears I've looked in I'd be able to check her ears, but you'd be wrong. I have tried many, many times, but there's something about Ava's ears that makes it impossible for me to see her eardrum! Give me anyone else's ears and I'd probably have a 95% chance of success. But I digress....

One good thing about Ava's clinginess is that it has spurred her to begin crawling. If we set her down to play on the floor and then walk away, she starts crying. Wanting to be with us, she attempts to move in our direction. It was quite a sight at first. She would lift her hands off the floor one at a time as you would when crawling, but her hands would return to the same place they had just left when she put them back down. Not making any progress, she altered her technique a little by lifting her contralateral leg (opposite side of the body) as she would lift her hand. She soon found out that she would make even less progress with this method as she would be balancing herself on one hand and one leg. Eventually she started to make piecemeal progress with her hand motions and discovered that her legs also had a role in forward motion. Thankfully, she has dropped the crying and crawling combo and resorted to purely crawling with the agility of a drunk groundhog. She's making progress and soon she's be crawling with the speed and sense of purpose I imagine Jackie Joyner-Kersey had at a young age.