Darius has recently acquried two new motor skills relating to bringing himself up onto higher grounds:

Standing up using wall as support

So far, Darius has only been able to stand up from his sitting/crawling position using an object which he can leverage on, such as the sofa, TV console, chairs and even people. He will grab onto the horizontal surface of the object and use both his arms and legs to push himself up.

However, he has been having difficulty getting up using a vertical surface, such as a flat wall. It was until a few days back when we discovered he had learnt this skill by himself. Since getting up this wall requires more strength from his feet (since his arms won’t be able to leverage on anything to push himself up anymore), this may imply that his legs are getting stronger:

Climbing up stairs

Since Darius started walking, we have been teaching him how to ‘walk’ up stairs while supporting his arms. He would raise up either of his feet automatically and place it on the next higher step. He then lifted up his other foot to bring himself up. Although we are glad that he knows how to raise his feet up when he approaches stairways, he is still unable to balance himself in the process without our help. We feel that it might be more suitable if he learns to get up stairs this way when he gets older.

Meanwhile, Catherine observed how other toddlers climb up the stairs at the playgrounds and decided to follow their ‘crawling method’ instead. This means that Darius will have to place both his arms on the next step of the stairs first before raising his feet one by one to get up:

Darius then surprised us yesteday morning by performing his new stairs climbing techniques without our assistance:

We are glad he has managed to catch the concept pretty quickly. ^^

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