At times I think our house looks like an MC Escher engraving. There are stairs everywhere, at different angles, in configurations that are impossible to baby-gate.
When we moved in a month before Anya was born we saw this as a bit of a drawback: stairs equal baby danger. But right now I think it's great: our house is like a giant playground on which she can learn the essential stair-climbing skills that would be lost to her in a bungalow.
We have a split level-bedroom with two steps separating the opposite ends. As I got dressed this morning, Anya was happily crawling up and down the steps, chuckling as she went; perfecting that technique of turning round, looking over your shoulder, and stretching one tentacle-like leg down to bear your weight, before getting to work on the other leg. She's basically mastered this particular obstacle and is ready to graduate to the ungateable four-step turn at the bottom of the main staircase.
This just reminds me of how silly the whole developmental-target thing is. Stair-climbing isn't a developmental stage, but it's pretty clear that Anya's good at it because she lives in a house with lots of stairs. Similarly, in the UK, her crawling accelerated very fast because there were big expanses of carpet that were comfortable and easy to crawl on, compared to our wooden floors.
Crawling is a developmental stage, sorta. It saddens me a bit to think how many people, in today's too-competitive parenting world, must end up worrying that their kid has something the matter with them, just because of the way they decorate their house.
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