The Castlemans are all growing, and that is a good thing.
Clif held his first baby ever the month before Flynn was born. Not having hardly any experience at all with little ones, except for our nieces and nephews, he's had one of the steepest learning curves. People offer up suggestions, advice and statements of things to expect with growing kids, but it's hard to wrap your head around some concepts until you experience them. He is an incredible dad and learning new things every day, which I know is exciting for all of us.
In the meantime I am still working hard on my area of growth: learning to breathe. I am a worrier by nature and, if you ask my father, by blood. Seriously, he can trace a full line of worriers in our family tree. I firmly believe I needed to experience all of the hiccups before getting pregnant with Flynn, as well as the challenges we faced during those 9 months (up to and including weeks of bed rest, threats of early delivery, emergency c-section and unexpected trip to the ICU) in order to start learning to let go of control and just go with the flow. I think I also needed the challenges we faced with our first pediatrician who fed my first-time mother doubts and fears until we finally wised up and took a stand against practices we didn't fully understand. All of those events have been teaching me how to learn to relax, trust myself, worry less, sit back and let things happen naturally. It has not been without effort, but I've made remarkable progress. So much so that I almost feel like I can't express my musings without them being interpreted as fretful by people who know me. Things that used to concern me greatly I can now contemplate without letting them carry me away to Stress City, but it can still take some thought and effort.
Flynn is going so fast I am both afraid to blink and hardly notice until I flip through pictures of him and compare his progress. Every day is a joy with him and I love watching him learn. I've discovered a pattern in his growth and mine: just as my musings about when he might hit his next developmental milestone start to edge towards anxious anticipation on whether it will be within the "normal guidelines" (which I don't truly care about, I promise, I know he will get there at his own pace), he hits it. I've been flirting with a little bit worried about him crawling for several weeks now. A lot of people say that they, their kid, or someone they knew skipped crawling and went right to walking. There are newer studies out, however, that say some kids who are having difficulty reading when they are older are encouraged to practice crawling, as it connects specific synapses in the brain. Similar to these studies, I think, are ones saying that all of the baby positioners out on the market now are encouraging parents to force developmental steps on their children before they are ready for it.
I think these are classic examples of how there is such a thing as TOO MUCH INFORMATION available these days. I've decided that I will sample some of column A and B, or else lose my mind. Flynn loves standing, but we don't encourage him to do it as often as I'm sure he would enjoy. I help him practice pulling up and give him time in his Johnny Jumper here and there, but I try to make sure there is much MORE time spent on the floor where he will be encouraged to work on crawling. Even still, his interest in getting from one spot to another had seemed lukewarm, at best, and I worried if there was something I could do to help spark that interest in him. As with pretty much every other milestone he's reached, I didn't need to spend any additional brain power on the situation. Practically overnight he started scooting forward, which transitioned within a day to military crawling, and now he is coordinating holding himself up on his arms and getting his knees under him at the same time. He's starting to get the 4-point rocking action going on, and though already completely mobile in all directions, I figure it might even only be a matter of hours until he is full-on crawling. He, apparently, has learned how to control himself from sitting to laying on his tummy, though hasn't quite figured out the reverse, but he's getting there. Pulling up with my help is a cinch, using the furniture is not yet on the radar, but that, too, is only a matter of time.
I still have some moments of worry start to creep up at what I envision to be the outer limits of an acceptable time frame for Flynn to accomplish something, then quickly remind myself that there isn't some magic day in which if he doesn't complete a feat, he'll never be able to do it. He's doing things on his own time and that is more than perfectly acceptable. He is doing them, and that is the important part.
This? This is growth. Lots and lots of growth.
