Our son Elijah is continuing to grow quickly and we celebrate his milestones by recording these on this blog. Today he crawled (forward) for the first time as well as sucking his thumb to comfort himself while riding in the sling.

Elijah has only recently started sucking his thumb while riding in the sling. I think he does it more as teething relief than as a nipple substitute.

Our four older daughters have all sucked their thumbs. Aisha was well and truly hooked at a couple months’ old. I can’t remember when Brioni began, but at five months’ old, she was crossing her fingers while she sucked her thumb!

When Brioni was turning four years old, I took away her comfort rug — Boolah — so that she would stop sucking her thumb. She continued sucking her thumb — hiding from me under her covers or clothes. I repented, returned Boolah, and left it up to Brioni to decide when she no longer wanted to suck her thumb. She quit cold-turkey a couple days before her fifth birthday.

Calista was three months old when she also became addicted — and still is, happily sucking away at age four! Always keen to imitate her sisters, Delaney was barely a week old when she first started sucking. She continues to suck her thumb at two.

Just because I think it's so cute, and because I don't really get a good look at him sucking his thumb, here's another pic for the record.

And although he’s been trying to get moving for several weeks, today Elijah started crawling properly, demonstrating that he can control his body to pursue objects out of reach.

Elijah pulled himself after the rolling drink bottle for several metres. He started at the armchair against the wall.

I’m learning to embrace our children’s milestones — however different they are — and celebrate them as they happen. In keeping with our philosophy of unschooling, our children do not need to grow and develop to an arbitrary schedule, but simply to their own physiological, mental, emotional and spiritual timing!