Sir Monkeypants is outside shovelling. Again. It’s his third time today. He’s my hero.

In the meantime I am sitting on the couch enjoying some chocolate ice cream. I feel very spoiled.

I need a little time to recover, though, from the fact that the Wee One suddenly became A Crawler last night. She’s totally ambulatory, like a little commando on a drill where she has to scramble under some barbed wire through the mud. You just put something in front of her that’s really, really awesome — like my new glasses, or the remote control — and she’s focused and on the move. She’s surprisingly quick considering she still doesn’t quite get her belly off the floor. And that half the time she’s crawling through a little spit up. We’ve been going through a lot of outfits lately.

This is my first Crawler, actually. The Captain was a Bum Shuffler — too lazy to bother to get down on all fours. Gal Smiley did something we like to call the “three point crawl,” using two hands and one foot while her bum and the other leg dragged behind, but she only bothered with that for like, three weeks before she recognised the inherent inefficiency and started walking at 11 months old. Just when you figure that having two kids has prepared you for every possible child scenario you can imagine, making you the reigning Expert On Motherhood, along comes another one with yet another set of ideas and skills and personality traits. Crawling! That’s just crazy!

Now that the Wee One can go places with such direct focus, we’re all in for a bit of a shock, I think. Today was a busy day, spent clearing old Cheerios and pieces of fluff off the floor, keeping the remote control out of reach (except when we deliberately taunted her with it, just to make a video of her making a beeline for it — a little present to keep you busy in therapy when you’re 25, dear!), and wiping up the trail of spit-up that now snakes throughout the house. The older two kids are in for quite a surprise when they find their stuff in the Wee One’s clutches, or more likely, her mouth.

Unexpected messes on the floor…leftovers from dinner being slurped up under the table…everything getting chewed up…It’s kind of like having a new puppy.