It’s been a very, very long time since I wrote on this blog. Mainly because most of my pre-Christmas moments of L-free time were spent wrapping every present in sight (with the inevitable result being that all the sellotape on all the name tags failed by Christmas day and we very nearly ended up in the awkward situation of my sister’s new boyfriend unwrapping an Iggle Piggle doll.) But really mainly because I’ve been struck down with a lurgy, the likes of which find one lying on one’s side of a 3am, emitting a strangled, dying-cow like parody of breathing, not-so-silently hating the man and child hatefully sleeping so hatefully peacefully nearby. Then, of course, said child caught said lurgy and after a few nights of traipsing back and forth from her cot with water, tissues, Calpol, vapour rub and anything else I could come up with which might render her unconscious once again sometime before 5am, I was far too exhausted to do anything during the day apart from lie on the sofa, sniff and work my way through all the Christmas chocolate.

But anyway, excesses of mucus and sugar aside, the latest issue in this game of parenthood has been walking. Or, as I like to put it, L Taking Her First Steps and then Sitting On Her Arse and Refusing To Take Any More.

L was a fairly late crawler, or so it seemed at the time. She spent a good two or three months on all fours, a look of heavy concentration on her face which would rapidly turn to despair as she would slide onto her belly and propel herself backwards, usually ending up underneath an item of furniture, dusty and displeased. She first managed that very slow and unsteady crawl forward a day before she turned 10 months. From that moment on, she was a baby on the go. In about a week she went from doddery, sideways-deviating, drunken-weave crawling to a baby-shaped bullet on all fours. So, I assumed that once walking became a reality, it would be the same way – master those first independent steps and then voila, toddler.

How wrong I was.

From crawling at 10 months, L progressed as normal to cruising on furniture, walking holding onto two hands and then, finally, walking holding onto just one finger. At 13 months she stood on her own. Just before she hit 14 months, she took her first steps – from Daddy to Mummy, a distance of about two feet but to we, her parents, it seemed the greatest two feet ever travelled by any human being in the history of mankind. “She’ll get the hang of it,” friends told me, that week. “Any day now she’ll get that confidence and then she’ll be off.”

Nearly two months later and it’s all we can do some days to get her to repeat those few independent feet. Her development hasn’t totally halted – she’s now able go from sitting to standing on her own and walk from there to a point of ‘safety’ sometimes around five or six feet away. Everything else is perfectly normal, as verified by my usefully-vocationed paediatrician sister (apart from the size of her head, which is apparently on the large size. Possessing the birth canal through which it made a memorable journey not so long ago, I found this revelation incredibly non-surprising.) She just hasn’t turned that corner between being able to walk and actually electing to do so on a regular basis. The funny thing is, if the challenge were vertical she would have smashed it long ago. She was scaling the stairs around the time she first started crawling, and worked out how to get herself down them around a month afterwards. She can climb the steps of a slide on her own, has worked out how to put her little plastic chair next to the sofa and climb from one to the other, and can get herself down again from any height by lying on her belly and dangling her legs over the side.

It’s just the walking thing.

I’m not really worried about it. Sure, my competitive mummy instincts are perhaps somewhat ruffled as I watch her peers practically skip around her at soft play. But I know there’s nothing physically wrong… And I know that by trying too hard to encourage her to walk I could actually make her less keen to do so, so I’ve tried to back off and let nature take its course… But it is hard, especially when I have a sneaky suspicion her reluctance may be the fault of my own genes. I took her to get her feet measured the other day and she was only just a 3, which the shop assistant said was usually the size fitted to babies just starting to cruise… So she’s got tiny feet… and an enormous head. Gary has size 11 feet and always seems to find hats which fit. I, on the other hand, wear dinky size 4s and often find issue with the ‘one size’ rule for headwear. Clearly my small-footed, large-headed genes have caused a heady imbalance of stature, rendering the independent toddle a feat of terrifying magnitude for my daughter. No wonder she hugs the wall.