Discovering Fatherhood
Reflections on everyday daddy stuff
Help, I stood up & can’t get down!
Here at DiscoveringFatherhood.com I love seen new developments in my daughter’s life: crawling, waving, and pooping only twice a day—it’s exciting. As a new dad everything is pretty much new. However, every now and then I experience or hear about something baby related that leaves me scratching my head.
This is one of those blogs.
Claire recently started standing up by grabbing on to things. It first happened in our living room as she grabbed on to the ottoman. My wife warned me of what was going on with a scream and some jumbled words, “bab-stand-stop!” I was amazed to see that even though Claire wasn’t crawling at the time, somehow she managed to stand. Claire has now mastered crawling and standing has become a new thing to do. I found her standing up in her crib (above photo) a few days ago. However, prior to being welcomed with that gorgeous smile the baby monitor greeted me with blood curdling screams. I thought Claire had fallen out of the crib.
This habit of standing and holding on to the crib rail has continued and unfortunately has occurred several times during the early hours of the morning. Screams come through the baby monitor, we open her door and she is standing, holding on to her crib. At least she has a cute smile to welcome us. My wife finally noticed that Claire would fall asleep as soon as we either laid her back down, or picked her up from her crib. Naturally we Googled, “baby cant sit down after standing up in crib” to see if this was something other babies did. It turns out our daughter isn’t that weird.
Apparently there is this phenomena, habit, lack of motor-skill-function—whatever you want to call it—that causes kids to stand up in their cribs, but not be able to get back down. What happens is that kids pull themselves up, but they have not developed the gross motor skills to bend their knees and sit back down. Claire has developed plenty of other gross skills, but we’ll leave that for another blog entry. Anyways, kids lock their knees and so instead of naturally bending them to sit down they tend to just fall either on their butts, or if they get rigid, end up falling like a surfboard, which never ends well. Some kids apparently fall asleep standing up and eventually fall down which naturally scares them to death hence blood-curdling screams from the baby monitor. I’m not going to lie, I laughed out loud when I thought of a poor kid holding on to dear life and falling asleep on the crib rail. Anyways, here is a video that explained this pretty well.
So now my wife and I are teaching Claire how to bend her knees. It isn’t working so well. Claire is really good at locking her knees. It’s like prying an alligator’s jaws open whenever I try to get her to bend them. Apparently, karate chopping the back of her knees is not an acceptable method of teaching her. So discovering fatherhood is also about doing trust falls with my 10 month old kid. Ha! Who would’ve thought it?
Discovering Fatherhood 
Leo,
I couldn’t help but notice the parallels between your experience with Claire and God’s experience with us. And, I suspect that he gets as much joyful amusement from watching us as we do from watching our children!
Thank you for the great reminder.
With the affection of Christ,
Vaughn
Thanks Vaughn. What you say is so true!