Stand up and be counted

No sooner has Eve perfected the art of crawling, which she does all the time, at speed, than she is moving onto the next development and is showing more and more interest in walking. This is good, ultimately if we want our daughter to win a gold medal at tennis/athletics/rowing/swimming/cycling (delete as required) then we need her to master the fundamental skill of upright walking as soon as possible. However, this in-between stage is not quite what I expected.

Scenario 1 - All is quiet chez Yummy Mummy and Eve is happily playing on the floor with her toys, and inching towards an increasingly terrorised cat. Yummy Mummy pops to the loo for no more than 2 minutes to find that Eve has, in this short time, crawled over to the shelf where we have the CDs (which she knows she is not allowed to touch), has pulled herself up to standing and is merrily chewing on a John Lennon CD. So now everything at the height of 1 foot or less, that being roughly Eve's height at the moment, is now under threat of damage.

Scenario 2 - 3am and Eve has woken up. In her pre-standing state she would suck her thumb and pop back to sleep. But now she decides to take the opportunity, as she has nothing else in her diary for this precise moment, to crawl over to the side of her cot, and pull herself up to standing and start gnawing on the side of her cot.

Both these scenarios would be rather cute except they both end in the same way. You can see the thought process as it happens.

"I'm standing up, whey hey, look at me, I am really clever. Wobble. No, I'm OK, still holding on. Wow the world looks good from up here. Wobble. Clever me, I've got that wobble thing sorted out now. Yipeee. OK, what now? I need to sit down again. Shit, how do I do that? Um, oh dear. Hello? Anyone there? Mummy? MUMMY? MUMMY HELP ME!!!"

So I get up, bleary eyed, or with my skirt round my ankles and grab my clever little girl and pop her back onto her bottom. At which point the whole things starts again.