This blog post was originally published on May 5th, 2021 on Floating the Boat.

Today marks the 9-month mark of Lily’s life. Now she’s been outside of the womb for as long as she’s been inside, and she’s developing rapidly. The past weeks have brought so much change in her. On April, 26th, she officially started crawling at eight months and almost three weeks. She’d been trying around and robbing herself through the apartment long before that, but now she’s really got it – and she’s fast! We couldn’t baby-proof the flat fast enough! We’d thought we’d done it already, but our little baby girl proves us wrong every day. For every day is another opportunity to explore that sharp edge, find a little fluff on the floor to put in her mouth, or explore our charging cables. 

With her eight months and three weeks, Lily is just in the average of when most babies start crawling (the average concluded from various studies is eight months and one week). It’s rather interesting that I still hear people say, “oh, so she’s taking it slowly then”, as well as “Oh wow, she’s an early crawler.” 
I don’t understand why we always have to comment on the velocity of our children’s development. What difference does it make whether your baby starts crawling at five months or eleven months? Eventually they all learn to walk, talk and eat (unless there is some sort of developmental condition, of course). 

Lily also doesn’t have any teeth yet. Personally, I am glad about that fact because it means I can still push away the potential bite during breastfeeding. She’s been going through a teething phase in the last days (oh, what a pain for both of us), but there is no tooth out yet. Still, she’s doing rather marvellously devouring her bread and fruit, and even meat. 

Ironically, for a baby with no teeth yet, Lily dislikes pureed food. Without entirely planning it, we’ve gone full BLW (baby-led weaning) and she already shares our meals (sugar and salt-free, of course). I’m going to do a BLW post in the near future when I’ve had time to try out some more recipes to share with you. However, I can already say, I prefer it much to feeding Lily. Feeding her always meant sitting down, not being able to eat myself, and begging for every spoonful. Now, my man and I eat and chat while she explores her cut finger food by herself and in all peace. 

Also, without meaning any offence to people who do it, but what’s up with the weighing of baby food? I know mothers in baby groups who broadly explain how their baby eats exactly 45g of grain in the morning, then 120ml of milk and 30g of pureed food at lunch, half a glass of apple sauce as snack, etc. etc. Most grown-ups don’t weigh their food, right? So why do it for your baby? I feel this is just another thing that sets you up for worrying needlessly. I try to look at the baby, not the scales and the books, and as long as Lily is healthy, happy, poops and pees regularly, what could be wrong? 
I also could never weigh her food, because even if I did, most of it lands on the chair, the floor or on her lap – but she seems to enjoy squeezing her food, then sceptically smelling it before taking a hesitant bite. Learning by doing, right? 

Alright, this hasn’t been exclusively about crawling, but a little 9-month-old update was there in the mix. Are there any topics that would interest you to read about? I always love getting some inspiration 🙂