I will admit that those first attempts were bittersweet for me and the tears in my eyes were not completely tears of joy. I was thrilled to see him start to move and excited at how well he was using his arms, however his right leg was not exactly going along with the program. The first time he crawled he made it about 4 feet on the hardwood floor and his right leg stayed completely flexed underneath him causing him to basically just drag it along. Even though rationally I knew to expect some issues as he mastered this skill seeing it right in front of me was much harder than I had anticipated. I realized that although he'd displayed equally atypical patterns with his right arm, the movements were smaller and because he has always had good trunk control they had less visual impact. On the other hand, the leg is responsible for big movements and asymmetry is much more apparent.
Luckily Adam did not share any of my anxiety about what this might mean for his gross motor development. He is the happiest I've seen him now that he can start to move himself around the room and explore. His crawling pattern has literally improved by the day and within a couple of weeks he was racing around and crawling over obstacles with a completely normal pattern. I occassionally see his right hand rotate in a little more than the left, but I am being really picky with that. In comparison to how my daughter crawled (who had no neurological involvement and very advanced gross motor skills) he actually has much fewer quirks!
Seeing how quickly he has progressed is nothing short of amazing to me. I cannot even begin to comprehend the way his little brain is re-wiring. There is such a mismatch between the stroke I saw on his imaging and what I watch him do everyday... I am so thankful for that.
Here are a couple of videos, the first is a few days after he started crawling and the second about a week and half:
