Is Your Baby a Late Crawler?

"When do we worry?" I asked the doctor.

"If she gets to be a year and she's not crawling or pulling up, then we might need some help," she told me. Nine months turned to 10 and 10 to 11, and still nothing. I fretted. I researched. Despite my efforts not to, I felt embarrassed among friends whose younger babies were already sprinting, doing yoga, and walking the family dog. ("Really?" said the teenager at the gym daycare. "She's 10 months old and can't crawl?" I fumed through my workout.) My parental anxiety got the best of me and I blamed myself for dragging Josie around in her car seat while we kept up with her older sisters' schedules. I asked my husband, for the forty-third time, if he was worried that our baby was a late crawler. (He said he wasn't: "How many eight-year-olds do you know who don't walk?" he asked.)

Eventually, I called the early intervention program in my state. They evaluated her, and determined that at nearly 12 months she was at about a seven-month level for gross motor skills; she qualified for services.