Pictures and Video

You can click on each picture to enlarge.
This is what our crawling mat looks like. It has a layer of foam padding underneath. The are the interlocking squares that are used for kids. I got mine at Sam's for $20.
they aren't the full width of the vinyl mat, so I used some smaller foam squares I already had. The blue tape is a guide for her to keep her knees together. Bette had suggested that I put tape down as a guide. We were pretending that it was a railroad track, so I decided to put tape across to make it look like tracks. The purple duct tape in the middle joins the 2 pieces of vinyl together, and she used to pretned that was the water. Anything outside the tracks is water now. Occasionally we play red light green light and the people have to pass. The heart shape stickers are there from before the tracks. Those were to help her keep her belly down. I would have never thought her crawling would progess to what it was. Not long ago, I asked Bette if she had become so proficient at crawing without using her feet that she may stay that way forever. She said no, much to my dismay... She was right. We now have a really nice looking crawl. I can't begin to tell you how many miles we have crawled before getting here. Our mat is 16 feet long, so one lap in 32 feet. So that has us crawling about 150 feet/day and creeping 300 feet. This calculates out to 20.68 miles of creeping and 10 miles of crawling/year!

At the end of our mat is out stamping station. I've included a picture of our mood stamps, they have been great. After each lap, we use a stamp as a lap counter. This has been a better way of counting as S is obsessed with counting and numbers. She hated counting 1-10, so I told her she could call them whatever number she wanted. For the 5 laps of crawling, we do 3 #9's and 2 #10's. It makes her fell like she is doing less. I have tried not counting for the patterns where we go up to 60, but she wants to count. She has learned counting to 60 this way, even though she cannot do this independently yet. The stamps have been a great way to count without counting.

We used to use a Leap Frog Letter factory toy where you would put in a letter and it would tell you it's name and it's sound. Every lap we would put a letter in. I also numbered poker chips so we could put a new one in line after each lap. Lap counters are a must for her. It has helped her learn to recognize her numbers. Creeping and crawling are the best times for learning.