Q & A

In my experience, when people see a baby, they ask two questions:
1) How old is he?
2) Is he crawling/walking?

The questions have no relation to each other. I know this because I asked them of other people before I had Noah, and I hadn't a clue when babies were supposed to start anything. I asked them to show my interest, to avoid silence, and to flatter the parents.

Now that I'm a parent, I understand this phenomenon in a whole new light. For instance, they sound like easy questions. Maybe. But do you want to hear 10 months and 3 weeks? Should I round up (even though adults don't say they're 40 until they actually turn 40)? But if I say 10 months, that's actually less accurate because he's closer to 11 months. Or do months sound too anal and really I should be saying "almost a year"? Maybe I should just say 48 weeks and let you do the math.

And then there's the milestone question. This should at least be binary, right? Wrong. Learning to sit was a two-month proposition for Noah - first sitting assisted, then sitting with less assistance, then sitting with an occassional fall, and finally sitting with such balance that he could turn, lean, and re-balance himself. Not to mention that he just learned how to sit up on his own.

The same seems to be true for crawling. Is he crawling? Well, not technically. He doesn't move quickly on all fours across vast spaces. But he does gradually get where he wants to go through a series of shoves, pushes, squirms, rotations, and willpower. He's deceptively mobile. It looks like you could leave him alone in a room, but then you come back in to find him chewing on a cord. (Not that I would do that.)

For the record, I don't mind people asking me these questions. In fact, I feel properly flattered that the asker is interested in my beautiful, perfect child. It's just taken me a little time to figure out which answers I'm comfortable giving. On the first question, I round to the nearest month or year (depending how interested you look). On the latter, I agree with a friend of mine who says, "No, but he gets where he wants to go." No kidding.