Crawling

A while back I did a post on an affordable crawler Emma received.  Since Emma was too small for the crawler we made quite a few adjustments to make it work for her.  Emma did manage to crawl around with the modifications but the crawler was not ideal.

This week the crawler her school purchased (one a bit smaller than what we have) arrived and I was able to see Emma try it out.  Immediately, she started scooting all around the room and it was evident that the belly sling made it much easier for her crawling rather than the foam covered board we were using.  Not a big suprise :-)  When we got home I looked at her crawler again to figure out a way to make it work with the belly sling.  And then I got and idea!

I can't believe I didn't think of it before since it's so simple.  I did an internet search for a local machine shop and gave them a call before heading over there .  The reason we couldn't use the sling is because the bar holders the sling slid into was tall and the lowest setting was still too tall for Emma.  Well, the machine shop took off a couple of inches on the frame where the sling slid into and - voila! a crawler that is a good height for Emma when she uses it with the sling.  To use it, I put the sling into the holder bars and then move them to the lowest level hole and then go even further down so the sling is not in any of the holder holes but rather sticking out the bottom a bit.  This even allows her to use her hands a bit more to crawl and her palms are starting to open up a bit in this position.  The bonus is that it didn't cost a cent to have it modified thanks to the incredibly nice machine shop owner!  If you are still looking for an affordable crawler you might want to consider buying the crawler we did and having it modified a bit for size.

So simple, yet so powerful.  She is still learning how to crawl a bit with the sling because it allows her to flip forward a bit and doesn't make her keep her feet/knees on the ground, but she is learning fast!  Yesterday she was crawling around the house for about 45 minutes before I thought to take some video of her.  She gets slower and her feet don't move as well the longer she moving with the crawler - it takes a lot of energy to move! - but even after 45 minutes she was still moving so I decided to take some videos to share.

Here is the video I took.  She starts to crawl around 45 seconds into the video.  Enjoy!