I Can't Believe I'm Thinking About That Song: "I Get Knocked Down, But I Get Up Again"

So Annika stood up today. Twice. Lily and I were both down on the rug with her but not interacting with her; Lily was attaching the dangling toys to the play-mat, and I was organizing the toy basket. Annika was just crawling around, and then I noticed she was near a chair whose seat cushion is pretty low to the ground. She was doing a sort of downward dog yoga position, then she rotated to a sitting position, then she crouched up and reached one little hand up to the seat. After a few seconds, she was vertical. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, but when I realized she was actually standing, I was excited. What a big girl! I said to her, and she chortled, and then Lily looked up, and I asked her if she knew what this meant, what Annika would be doing before too long.

Falling down, she said, as though the answer were obvious. And I said no, walking, but later I was thinking about it, and I realized Lily's answer was just as valid as mine. And in fact, it happened Lily's way later in the day. We were in Lily's room; Lily was doing a kind of annoying Lego mosaic toy that she always thinks she wants to do but doesn't really like, and I was putting away some winter clothes. Annika, in a recurring theme, was just crawling around. She made her way to Lily's stool, again reached up that one little paw, and was soon standing, her expression revealing that even she was a little surprised. She's doing it again, Mama! Lily said, and I was about to make noises about how exciting this all was, when boom. She fell right onto her bottom, and her facial expression barely changed: that same, surprised, how-did-I-end-up-here?

And for a number of reasons I have found myself thinking about this all evening, the miracle of standing when you haven't ever stood, and the inevitability of falling, when you haven't ever fallen, and then for the rest of your life. Lily has been asking lots of questions about when the first people existed, and how they got here, so I bought a book on evolution, and we have been talking about the subject quite a bit: tadpoles to frogs, apes to humans, single cell creatures to eventually us by virtue of time, time, the passing of time. We've also been talking a lot about gardening, what seeds need to grow, and sometimes I find myself mixing up the ideas in my head: the single cell creatures needing water and sunlight to straighten their spines, grow taller, taller still, faces toward the sun like sunflowers on thick green stalks.

I'm not on any mind-altering medications tonight, so this is just me, and I don't think this is too far-fetched, if a little loopy in the rendering. But evolution is a kind of growing, and growing is a kind of evolution, and in a span of less than a year--she is eight months old today--Annika has gone from a tiny seed to an upright being, spine straight, face uplifted toward the sun. Welcome to the world, I found myself thinking for the second time since the morning of her birth, but this time not with exhaustion and relief suffused with joy but a little ruefully. For standing is a miracle, a beginning, the state before the step that launches all the walking in a lifetime, but it is also, once accomplished, only a matter of time before the falling starts too.

So as not to leave you (or me) on a somber note, I need to remind myself that as Lily (gladly) rushed away from her Lego mosaics, and I dropped a pile of hats and mittens onto the floor to rescue Annika from her splat, she put her little hands flat on the floor beside her, one on each side, and pushed to a crouching position. And then she started to crawl again.