Minor is almost eleven months old and still cannot crawl. I should say, he refuses to crawl. Whenever he finds himself on his stomach, he whines incessantly until placed upright. At first I thought he might have some kind of medical condition that made the prone position uncomfortable, but we’ve ruled out reflux and the doctors can’t think of anything else that would affect him that way. He learned to sit quite early, at five months on the dot, and it seems like he’s just loath to regress to a position closer to the floor when he’s already gained the dizzying heights of the half-lotus.

They say that crawling is in fact NOT a necessary developmental milestone; it’s an optional pit stop on the road to walking. It does seem that Minor will be one of those kids who walks without first learning to crawl. Husband and I sometimes amuse ourselves by imagining complications that might ensue as a result of Minor’s never mastering this skill:

“Soldier! Get your ass down! Can’t you see the bullets whizzing overhead? Drop and inch yourself over to that foxhole!”

“But Sarge! I . . . I . . . I don’t know how to crawl!”

But a boy’s got to get from Point A to Point B, and so Minor has devised two alternate methods of locomotion. I present to you “the scoot”:

Since scooting is slow, Minor sometimes prefers to ride. Look at my little future NASCAR driver take the corners in the World’s!Ugliest!Kitchen!:


In a few years he’ll be tearing up the track, but at least the announcers will never have occasion to say, “He’s crawling from the wreckage.”