Zoe is Walking

Zoe started walking a few weeks ago. She’d been building up to it for quite awhile, and it’s suprising how quickly it’s become her primary method of getting around. For the first week or so, walking was a novelty — a game she would play with us, or something to make people clap — but as her stability increased, she’s started crawling less and less until now she’s on her feet 90% of the time.

One of the funniest things is that she waited long enough to start walking that she’s very aware of her sense of balance. She doesn’t faceplant very often because most of the time when she walking, if she’s even a little unbalanced, she immediately drops to the floor. She’ll sit there for a second, and then when she feels balanced again, she stands up and goes about her business. So most of our videos of her walking have this funny up-and-down thing going on.

These two videos were taken at the park last week, where she spent her time trucking around following Milo and Oskar, with regular detours back to the picnic blanket to get more chicken from Annie. In the first video, at the end you can hear her ask Annie for “more” and make the sign language gesture for “eat,” and in the second video, as she walks away at the end, you can hear her say “bye-bye” without looking back.

Zoe is Walking!

This weekend Zoe started walking! She’s taken a few steps before, but it was always like she didn’t really realize she was doing it – and we could never get a repeat performance. We were at her friend Maia’s first birthday party, and she stood up, raised her arms over her head and looked at me like, “Do you see what I’m doing? This is pretty cool, right?” Then I held out my arms and she took about five steps right to me. We didn’t have the camera out, but thankfully she did it again later that night.

Zoe is Cruising

Zoe is starting to see the potential of this whole “bipedal locomotion” thing. Left to her own devices, she’ll still drop down and crawl wherever she needs to go, but given a willing set of hands to help her walk around, she’ll start walking. She gets very excited and leans her whole body forward, so it’s all her feet can do to keep up with her torso. She can’t quite stand up on her own yet, but when she pulls up on the couch or in her crib, she’ll happily sidestep around to get to her target (usually one of the cats on the couch, or pulling the curtains aside to peek at the backyard in her room).

Walking at the Zoo