My daughter tells me her parent/baby group shows her nine variations of normal. What her baby—my granddaughter—does is one variation. But measuring one baby against another is a pointless exercise. She is right.
The baby books from past generations in my family show more variations of normal. Comparing these variations is even more pointless, given that they come from times past when rearing children was done differently. For example, now infants must never sleep on their tummies until they can turn over by themselves and choose their own sleeping position. When I was raising my babies, I was told to put them to sleep on their tummies. Both pieces of advice were designed to avoid sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Go figure.
But despite the pointlessness of comparing children’s development, as a grandmother, I am prone to making the comparisons anyway. My granddaughter just turned seven months old. I have at hand the baby books of my son and daughter, as well as my own. (My parents’ baby books are also in my possession, though I didn’t dig them out for this post.)
What, I asked myself, were my children and I doing at seven months?
I’ll begin by saying that my granddaughter is larger than any of us, and my kids were large for their times. At seven months, my granddaughter is over 20 pounds. By comparison, my daughter (her mother) was about 17.5 pounds, and my son was around 19 pounds. I was somewhere between 16 and 17 pounds.
My daughter got her first teeth at 4.5 months, just about the time my granddaughter did. My son was 7 months, about the same time I first sprouted a tooth. Granddaughter eats far more “grown-up” foods than my kids did at 7 months. Her two little teeth don’t do much to help, but she can get the morsels down without choking, so two teeth are plenty.
My mother wrote in my baby book that I could sit alone at 4.5 months (though I wonder if this is accurate). My granddaughter could sit upright pretty steadily at about six months, about the same time as my son. But my daughter didn’t really sit until 9 months—my note in her baby book says she didn’t like to sit. That brought back memories of her lying on the floor happily playing with her toys. By contrast, my granddaughter likes to sit to amuse herself until she falls over—she can’t get herself back to sitting yet.
According to my mother, my paternal grandfather taught me to creep when I was five months old. Both my daughter and my son both creeped at six months, before mastering a true crawl sometimes later. At seven months, my granddaughter isn’t creeping or crawling, but she can roll anywhere she wants to go. So what difference does it make how she ambulates through the world?
My mother wrote that I could pull myself up to standing in my crib at 6.5 months. My son pulled himself up at about 7 months, but daughter didn’t until 10 months. My granddaughter certainly is not pulling herself up yet, but then, she has more weight to pull than our earlier generations.
As I’ve written before, my son walked at fifteen months, my daughter at 14.5 months. And I took my first steps at 10.5 months. I believe my granddaughter will walk in her own time as well, though she certainly is nowhere near ready now.
So the lesson I learned from researching this post is that it makes no difference what size or schedule any baby follows. They will mostly be variations of normal. Still, the variations are what make life fun and interesting. And the variations also give grandmothers things to talk about wherever they go.
What variations of normal have your kids and grandkids followed? Do you compare them?
