Independent Girl!

In the next video (below) you'll see what happens when Noa walks holding one (or both) of our hands; i.e., she tries to pull them off! Noa doesn't love to use the walker when she is with us - and even if she did, McCall really isn't set up for people with walkers - so we're always looking for creative ways to get her walking more independently and this one has been successful: she puts her hands in our pockets (she can do this with one person, as she is doing in this video, or with one hand in each of our pockets if the three of us are walking together). She is much more stable like this - when she is holding our hands she just seems to sink down and drag her feet along and pull on us, but walking like this she really has to do more work and actually seems to like it better. We would get a lot of funny looks down at the beach doing this. For the mostl part grown ups understood that she couldn't walk and Noa got some nice, encouraging comments from friendly strangers (she really seemed to like that a lot!) Kids just starred and wondered and sometimes asked if she was really a "little kid" - since she couldn't walk.