Physical Edumacation

In some ways, Shane is the opposite of me as a toddler and more like the adult me. 

To me, there seem to be three main areas of toddler growth: social skills, gross motor skills, and fine motor skills. Most children have their preference and they tend to show the most growth in one area. 

Shane is a gross motor boy. 

I was a fine motor skills boy. I was the bottom of my class in kindergarten for gross motor skills! I could not walk across a 4x4 plank according to Nana.

Here, you have Shane cruising on concrete wheelstops in a parking lot.

Like all of my family, I eventually found my inner monkey. All of my brothers and sisters worked to terrify Nana by scaling trees, hopping on roofs, and dangling from heights.

Shane is doing it years before I figured it out.

Normally, I would have stood closer by to supervise, but after you've seen someone do something multiple upon multiple times you start to develop some confidence in them. Shane's built sturdy.

We removed all of the baby gates in the house when Dan moved out. Shane did take a tumble down the stairs once (he tried to run down the basement stairs and do a 180 two steps down), but he bellied down and put out his hands to protect himself. Our stairs go halfway down and wrap around. He got up laughing.

I wonder how much of Shane's predisposition to gross motor skills is from his personality, his genetics and from our parenting style. I know I'm hands on when I play with him. I roll him over, flip him upside down, and wrestle around.

I taped us fooling around in his room one day. I'm doing a little experiment with video quality so I made a normal and an HD version of the video.

Standard

HD

Shane's growth with gross motor skills clearly dominates his social and fine motor progress. That said, he has still made a ton of progress socially and with his ability to communicate. He improvises song lyrics sometimes and can say the darndest (and cutest) things. Where he really needs to show more progress now is with his fine motor skills.

I'm not really worried about it, though. I lagged behind in both my speech and gross motor skills as a kid, and I'm mostly normal now! It will be fun to see how Shane continues to grow into himself.

PS This post would have gone up on Tuesday night, but my internet connection fizzled.