Motivation

We are loving how this kid responds to a little motivation. For a week or two, Riley was experimenting with crawling by taking a few tentative steps at a time. But then he'd usually lose interest. In this video, you can see that pattern at play. Then his dad introduced a game changer. He dropped Riley's absolute favorite thing -- a pacifier -- about five feet away from him (listen carefully at about 12 seconds). That was all the motivation he needed for his first real room-crossing crawl, captured here:



Go Riley!!! We were so happy Andy captured the first big crawl on video.

The next day, the boy again demonstrated how well he responds to motivation. He had just dumped over his laundry basket for the first time and was immersed in discovering the smelly treasures within. And then he spotted the milk. I entered his room with a bottle of breastmilk and set it down in the opposite end of the room. Faster than you can say "milk", he tossed the laundry basket and crawled all the way across the room. What a sight!

Hopefully he'll always be this easy to motivate. I'd love to think I can wave a glass of milk in front of him until his homework is done. At that point it might be a grilled cheese sandwich or a cookie, but I'll still appreciate his willingness to bargain.