The Silent First Step

Finley has been teasing us with almost first steps all week. She would lift the foot, move it forward, seem to have placed it soundly and then roll forward off balance. I have many long minuets of video that lead to nothing exciting. She smiles and wobbles around holding on to this or that, falling, or typically, sinking to her knees and crawling quickly out of sight.

Babies have an awkwardness gauge that they use to put parents in the oddest situation they can find. It is a built in phenomenon, and, you can ask my mother, mine was off the charts. I am getting payed back in a very subtle way. I am not overly easy to embarrass, and my mother is no longer easy to embarrass, thanks in large part to dealing with a child me, so they, my kids and my mother, have had to carefully devise their revenge. I am on to them...

For example...
Sunday we were interviewing a preaching candidate, meaning that he preached for us and then we has a Q&A session at the end of service to get to know him a bit better. For the Q&A I gave up on sitting in the pew and sat down with Finley in the aisle so that she could crawl a bit, get her wiggles out (less screaming was the goal). See, I'm not a shy person, this was totally in my comfort zone. Finley crawls some, and then comes over to me and pulls up on the bench to cruise. She then proceeds to take her FIRST step from the bench toward me. I am ecstatic! She TOOK HER FIRST STEP! And, true confession of an extreme people pleasing extrovert, where everyone else can share my joy, right? Except for the small issue of being in church at a time. Any other time I would be jumping up, tossing my child in the air and doing a happy dance but that would frowned upon, and not just by my husband.
So I have to sit there and scream whisper "YEAH! Did you see that?" to everyone whose eye I can appropriately catch which from the floor in the aisle is not many.
See? A special kind of payback engineered for my kind of crazy. I's already working on secret plan of my own to share with my grandchildren. You can never start too early, right?