Shoes! (for a day)

(Photo: The little remaining evidence of those first shoes - both of them.)

Today I bought Rimonit her first shoes. As you may have guessed by the previous sentence, in the loooooong time since my last post, she has started walking - and she is really getting the hang of it, if I do say so myself.

On erev Rosh Hashana (end of September this year), I noticed her standing on her own for significantly longer periods than usual, like maybe two minutes or so. I got the feeling that walking would come soon, but I didn't realize how soon; I saw her take a few steps on her own two days later, as Rosh Hashana was ending.

Although the process leading up to those first steps was extensive - from cruising and pushing chairs around to standing on her own (which she started in August) and gradually increasing her standing time - once she took her first steps, there was no stopping her, and her rate of improvement was incredibly rapid. The first week or two she took at least as many falls as steps, remaining largely unperturbed by her frequent tushy-to-floor contact. Warren dubbed her the drunken sailor, but day by day her sea legs gave way to land legs, the amount of steps she took increased until I stopped counting them, and her walking-to-crawling ratio shifted in favor of walking. It's only a few weeks later, but she has become a master walker, and she took well to her shoes after only about 30 seconds of wondering why her feet were suddenly so heavy.

And so it goes: from crawling infant to toddling toddler in the space of a mere month.

UPDATE: The day after I wrote this post (I wrote it Sun., Nov. 9), one of her shoes fell off her foot and disappeared forevermore (I only noticed after it was already gone). It was apparently some combination of the shoe being too loose and the velcro being too weak, giving us something to look out for next time. I wasn't going to put up this post at all, seeing as how it got dated so soon, but finally decided it still makes a bloggable, er, footnote to the Story of the Smunch. In the meantime, she is back to being shoeless (though we'll fix that soon enough)...