Since roughly end of December/early January, Logan became obsessed with standing up. He wanted to be propped up against furniture, where he would often lean precariously to one side or the other, often toppling over. This required, of course, constant supervision, but at least you could just sit behind him and catch him before he hit the ground.
He then started trying to take steps but without holding on to anything or anyone. In mid-January, he finally figured out that if he had both hands held, he could take steps around the house. So, then became the drive to walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk constantly.
The major downside is that all of the grown-ups had to hold both of his hands, hunching over, because he wasn't steady enough for a one-hand or no-hand endeavor. After five minutes, your back would start to ache, so you'd need to trade off with someone else for a while.
At the beginning of March, he would occasionally take some strolls with just one hand, but mostly it was both. And he was still rolling to get to the destinations he wanted: no crawling and no pulling up to stand.
We went to his 12-month pediatrician appointment, and she wasn't terribly worried about his crawling/pulling up deficits, but she said if he still wasn't doing it at 15 months, we'd need to get him to PT.
I went home and Google'd PT for infants, finding a site that had a nice presentation detailing some exercises. The most useful was having Logan sit up everytime we went to pick him up. So, we'd roll him on his side, take a hold of the arm that was up and help him sit up, while encouraging him to push up with the down arm.
One week later, he was sitting up totally by himself and without prompting.
My mom had also started working with him on crawling, and after a week of her helping him, he took off on his own.
We also started walking with him one-handed, so he had to start working more on his own balance. He took to that like a champ and was flying around the house within a day.
Now, he not only sits up from the ground, but he pulls to standing. He's cruising around furniture, and three days ago, he decided that he'd had enough of waiting for the lazy grown-ups to take his hand and walk him around the house, and he took off walking by himself.
It wasn't his first, unprompted, unassisted steps (he took three steps from me to the ottoman on 24 Mar) but it was his first long walk, all the way around the kitchen and then back and forth from bedroom to bedroom, without holding on.
You have to hover over him, or shuffle on your knees behind him, because, especially on the turns, he still tends to get way out of balance, but he's clearly getting better and better at it. We're actually looking forward to him doing it unassisted, because it's really hard work walking with him either holding his hand or being prepared to catch him.
Of course, that opens a whole new set of problems: dangerous things in cabinets, walking into things, falling down. But we can monitor those while sitting down...
All in all, he's doing great. He gets very frustrated when he wants to walk and nobody wants to walk with him, so he can't, and this is probably why he's trying so hard to walk without us. We're starting to see some signs of toddler tantrum, beating his hand in hitting motions when he wants out or up and we don't do it.
He's one stubborn little dude, so I suspect we're in for some battles of will in the very near future.
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