I’m now halfway through month eight of new mommydom, and I’m getting my head above water and coming up for air. Wyatt is now happily creeping backwards around the kitchen and living room floors. The baby who always wanted to be held is now the baby who bucks in my arms when he wants to be put down. The baby who needed me to provide him with some sort of stimulating change every five minutes is now the baby who can spend a half hour to an hour at a time on the floor with the same collection of objects. I’m now in a position to review my practice of attachment parenting and conclude that it has lived up to at least one of its selling points, to my great relief. Dr. Sears and other proponents have long claimed that attachment parenting results in kids that are more, not less, independent.

My babe is not spoiled or clingy. He’s choosing independence that is appropriate for his developmental phase. Not only does he not try to monopolize my attention, but I have to work to get his attention, because he’s so curious about the world. All he seems to want to do all the time is look around for interesting objects to grab and shake, bang, drop, push or fling. If I want him to look at me longer than two seconds, I have to make funny noises, army crawl across the floor, play an I’m-gonna-get-you game, or come up with some other antic that he thinks is funny. It could be that he is showing his personality already. Or maybe all the babywearing I did encouraged him to feel secure with me while not focusing on me, but instead focusing on the environment as I moved around. Either way, no worries about him wanting to be the center of attention all the time. No, he just wants me to be a reliable base of operations for him to explore his world.

It seems he could happily relegate me to the role of feeder and object retriever! As long as I pick him up to bounce and sing to him whenever he gets tired or his teething gets bad. That and get him unstuck when he backs himself into a corner. He does not yet know how to go forwards! Oh yeah, and another important role is to keep Marten the Cat from sticking his butthole in Wyatt’s face. (Though Wyatt doesn’t seem to mind when he does. In fact, he grabbed Marten’s butthole a few days ago.)