Juliana is just beginning to walk. She started standing from a squat position a week or so ago and will start taking some steps by herself. This is a joyous time when I finally see Juliana begin to be more mobile and independent and start to grow up, a definite upgrade from the drooling, babbling, barfing, pooping blob that constitutes the first few months of her life. This is a time when I am both happy that she is growing up, and filled with dread that she will soon be running all over the house and getting into things faster. This is the point where I should really think long and hard about my immediate future and what a walking child can accomplish. I should take this opportunity and begin to push her down every time she starts to stand up.
I loved watching Ryland begin to walk, but was filled with trepidation when Weston started walking, especially since he started walking at ten months. It's like that little booger was born to run and get into everything. With Juliana, I'm both happy that she will soon be able to walk, and thus be able to run away from her annoying brothers, and uneasy that she will be following me around the house constantly.
Growing up is a wonderful and milestones are important for the child, but during the transitions can be terrible for the parent. For example, potty training. Ryland took a long time to potty train. There were times where I felt like I was reading an entire libraryful worth of books while he sat on his little Thomas the Tank Engine potty giggling and listening to stories until something inevitably would come out on its own and then I could shower him in praises. We finally got the bright idea of giving him the phone to play with so that we didn't have to spend all our time in the bathroom, but then he learned that the only way he could watch Youtube was when he was going potty so he spent even more time sitting on the potty.
I dislike changing diapers and wiping the pasty poo from in between all of their little fat rolls, but accidents where pee gets on the floor and poop falls down the leg of their pants is even worse. There's not much worse than hearing the words, "I had an accident" and then struggling to get his underwear off make sure that the giant ball of poop in the underwear doesn't plop onto the ground and stick like silly putty to the tile floor. It was time like these that I thought that having him in diapers forever wouldn't be so bad.
Walking is not as messy as potty training, however. It's the joy of seeing Juliana make the steps into toddlerhood and also the dread that with this new mobility she will be running away from me when she needs to get dressed or run out into the parking lot. The ability to walk is an important skill and babies are eager to learn it. Even the youngest of babies will start to move their little feet in a walking motion if you hold them up. It would seem that walking would help me out more, but my kids always seemed to want to walk in the places I didn't want them to walk, like the parking lot, and were physically unable to walk when I had five hundred things in my hands.
In the end, it is probably better that Juliana learns how to walk. It may be more frustrating for the time being, but in a few years if I have to carry her to her first day of preschool and have to explain to her teachers that she can talk and is potty trained, but never learned to walk will be embarrassing on my part. I guess I'll take the constant running into things so that it looks like I beat my child with a wiffle bat and the following me around all of the time over having to continue to carry her everywhere for the rest of her life. On the bright side, at least I'm not teaching her how to drive yet.