At 7 months old Adam is well within a normal age range for learning to crawl, however he has been up on hands and knees for a couple of months so Dave and I decided to try a little project to help him on his way. We had read about crawling tracks on other blogs and decided to make our own.
I'll say its really very simple to make, but also have to add that Dave did most of the work! I was responsible for the padding, but that's about it. After we assembled the supplies it was finished during the kids afternoon nap, so not more than about 2 hours.
Here's the process:
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We used 2 random MDF boards because we happened to have them in the basement. Dave made two cuts - the first to get a 14 inch base from the one board, and the other board he cut in half for the sides. I think they were about 50 inches long.
We used six "L" brackets to secure the boards in place. |
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I am extra cautions about corners/edges and the prominent brackets so I used a fleece blanket on the base and fleece remnants from around the house to add extra padding to those areas. I just secured it with duct tape to limit the number of staples. Then we used an egg crate mattress pad from Walmart (full size, about 11 dollars) with the flat side up to fully pad the track. Dave used the staple gun to secure it to the base and wrapped it up over the top. |
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Then we added a vinyl table cloth (Walmart about 5 dollars) as the cover. The fleece underside stuck well to the foam so we only had to staple it down on the bottom and outside of the track. No staples on the crawling surfaces.
Here is Adam on his first trial run! |
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We experimented with propping it up at different angles to find one that gave him enough of a forward weight shift without making him too hesitant to move forward. |
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It took a few days before he really moved down the track without encouragement and lets be clear it was not using a crawling pattern just yet!
He used a combo of advancing arms or legs and then going to his belly and army crawling.
It did help him start moving forward though and 4 days after we built it we saw
his first real attempts at crawling on the floor! |
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I refuse to have anything this big in my house that only serves one purpose and as a therapist I like that this can be used for kneeling and pulling to stand when its flat. |
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Adam seems to like it as well :) |
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