We have a crawler - watch out world!

We can hardly believe that Daphne is already in the category of an unsupported sitter and now a crawler! Granted she isn't doing the 'classic crawl' - which is up on all fours. But, what she is doing is referred to as the 'belly crawl'. And as you can see in the video she is eager to get to her destination by any means necessary! She does get up on all fours and rocks back and forth, but hasn't figured out that she can go anywhere by alternating her arms and legs - which we're sure, that is right around the corner. Although, some babies go right from belly crawling to walking. So, who knows.

Oh boy, this means that the vacuum will be getting a work out -- and by vacuum, it is obviously implied that we are referring to Edna, our house cleaner.  :)  I kid, I kid. But seriously, she will be scheduled to come by and do her 'deep' house cleaning more often.

Now, let's talk about baby proofing. There are so many decisions about how to do it, when to do, and even how much should be done. And, like everything else in the parenting world, everyone has their opinion and what works best for them. So, taking that it stride - we aren't too worried about Daphne getting into everything. Of course the cabinets that contain the household cleaners and other obvious baby dangers will be locked with one of those neat cabinet-locking-thingies. But there will also be cabinets that she is more than welcome to open and pull everything out of and 'play' with. I mean, banging on pots and pans with a wooden spoon is a right of passage for a little one - isn't it?!

Of course, making the house safe for Daphne is our first concern but we also really don’t want to live in a house that looks like a daycare center or a baby prison for the next few years. Plus, we’d like to keep the amount of permanent damage done to furniture and walls to a minimum. We still feel a bit overwhelmed by the huge list of things around the house that are apparently death traps waiting to happen.

There are parts of us that feel like some of the babyproofing stuff out there is totally excessive. While we certainly don’t plan to completely abstain from child proofing, we do think we’ll try to keep things within reason. If we find that Daphne is a bit more 'adventurous' than the average baby, we figure we can add to the baby proofing arsenal as she grows. What do you think – any baby proofing you did that turned out to be overzealous or things you wish you’d baby proofed better?

Here some photos from another recent Olan Mills session. A little background on the photos: Rachel bought the cute 'fish' dress (as we affectionately call it) at Once Upon A Child for $3.50 - what a bargain! The fish bowl with sea critters was a gift from Grandma LaManna. And as our luck would have it (for some unknown-weird-random reason) the Olan Mills just happened to have a white clamshell as a prop! We were unable to get the same photographer as we did the last time, but this one was just as great with Daphne - and she even wanted us to sign the release form so she could use the photos in her studio!