And we're walking, we're walking, we're walking...

As I always tell my playwriting students, the middle is the longest part of the journey and so it is with getting from one side of the playground to the other.

I've started bringing the walker to the playground - rather than having her walk holding my hands, and it's much better for all of us. As you can see, when she is using the walker she must stand with her weight in her feet. When she is holding our hands, she tends to collapse and use our arms as her support as much as possible (which can really do a number a person's back, not to their thumbs). It is a bit of a pain to bring the walker... but the pay off is worth it for all of us.

One of the things we're working on now is getting Noa to initiate walking. She tends to just stand there and wait for someone to pull the walker. Frankly, she doesn't know why she should move, or what direction to go in (i.e., she doesn't see something she wants to go to). So we need to help her learn to even WANT to explore.

Let me take a moment to answer a possible question here: What if you made a sound and she heard something she wanted to go to? We're working on that too - but her sense of direction, as related to where a sound comes from and how far away that sound might be, is still something she is learning. We sighted people actually learn how to follow a sound by looking and seeing where the sound came from first. For example, if we make noise with a toy that is nearby, she knows she can get it. But if it is more than a foot away, it might as well be on the moon: all she knows is she can't get there. So, this is all a part of learning that she can.

Noa does know that if she keeps going with this walking she will get to the other swing: that is our routine and that is the key motivation here. Still, she doesn't always seem to get that she can move the walker without us. So we've been making deals with her (she likes deals) - we pull for 10 steps, then Noa does it herself for 10 steps. In this video, you can see she does her 10 steps and then Ben just waits. After some fussing she does keep going further than 10 (and this is some of the best walking we've seen her do: smooth and controlled).