On Baby Mobility - Pulling up

When babies start to pull up onto things, it can be exciting as well as one of the scariest things that ever occurs in the first year.

My little one discovered how to pull up the same day he started to crawl. Two milestones in one day isn't seen very often, but it happened with ours. My husband witnessed the pulling up long before I did and while he told me about it, seeing it yourself really makes it real. Not that I didn't believe him, but I guess I just had to see it.

That particular day, he was being especially cranky and I decided to put him down for a nap because the cranky was relative to his sleepiness. He fussed for a little bit and then quieted down and when I went to check on him, I found that he had pulled himself out of his sidecar co-sleeper and onto our bed. There he was, laying face first on our bed, legs still in his co-sleeper. Luckily, I was able to move him back to his bed without waking him up.

That type of pulling up can be really scary because there is the fall risk. Other pulling up comes with its fair share of falling though and that is why I think it is one of the hardest times as a parent in the first year.

When babies first learn to pull up, it is new and exciting, but unfortunately, they don't automatically know how to return to the floor. They will fall forward and backward. And not lightly, mind you. It appears as though they fall straight, like a board. And for some reason, they don't seem to have a sense of mobile things either. A chair or toy on wheels is just as good for pulling up as anything else, leading to more falls when it rolls away.

For these situations, I found it easiest to keep my little one off of the tile and just redirect him to the carpet. Our fireplace has a floor level hearth, so I originally wasn't too worried about it. I should have been. One day I saw him pull up on his bouncer seat and then take a face-plant directly into the side of the fire place. Luckily, he was okay. Seeing that and seeing how the hard hearth was still a potential site for injury lead me to line it with foam puzzle mats. These created a nice cushion should he decide to fall again, at least, if he hit the floor.

Before too long, they do figure out how to place their hands down to catch their fall or they will learn to sit to return to the floor. Before that though, it is very hard to see them fall, but it is part of their development. They have to figure out how to stop the fall and unfortunately, they can't learn to do that if they never fall. I'd suggest keeping them from real dangers like hard flooring until they get their bearings and learn to work their way back to the floor on their own.