Half a year ago Ingrid preferred walking to riding in the pushchair. I remember reading some sort of brochure to parents and laughing out loud at their advice: “Let your child walk sometimes instead of always sitting in the pushchair”. Ingrid was rushing around like a madman all the time and wouldn’t sit still.

Then the running habit disappeared and suddenly she hardly ever wanted to walk. Always the pushchair. And then she even started watching TV – a true couch potato!

Now all of a sudden she’s in a walking mood again. Several days this week we’ve walked home from nursery, and today we walked all the way from the nursery to the supermarket. Which is great, and I like that she’s walking… except that it takes absolutely forever.

The nursery-to-supermarket walk takes me no longer than 5 minutes, and would maybe take 10 with her short legs. If walking actually meant walking forward in a straight line, that is. Today it had been raining and there were puddles everywhere, and Ingrid could not pass a puddle without jumping in it. The first, really large one, stopped her for several minutes, and she could have stayed there much longer if I hadn’t suggested that we go see if we can find some more puddles, some new and even better ones. From then on we walked from puddle to puddle. At each one she would stop, carefully position herself at just the right distance, and then jump with both feet. If it was a really good puddle then she jumped some more.

I was so pleased that she was walking that I didn’t want to force her into the pushchair, so I let her jump. Besides, I expected her to actually tire of the puddles after a while. She didn’t, of course, so the 10-minute walk took us well over 20 minutes. I was actually relieved she wanted to sit in the pushchair on the way back…