Doing it her way (Added pics 9-14)

Every baby does things their own little way, and well Kylie definitely has hers. Today was her first little contest...Sweet Pea Baby Crawling Contest at the Lenexa Spinach Festival. We were positive Kylie would do great, since she loves to motor on all over the house, and taking out anything that gets in her way.

There were 16 babies signed up, and only four lanes for crawling, and Kylie was in the 3rd heat. It was so cute to watch the babies and the parents trying to entice the babies to crawl toward them...usually with cell phones, keys, or real baby toys. Anyway, Kylie's name was called so we got our game faces on and leg warmers to protect those knees and give her some traction. At first she and the other babies just sat there, trying to figure out what was going on, and then dad tossed out a cell phone and she began her bear crawl after it. She did great and she WON!! Yippee, our baby girl won and it was so cute and exciting!! No one but us knew how big that was. It was more than just a contest...it was our baby girl out there with other babies, and doing something we didn't know she would be able to do a few months ago. Then the unexpected happened...

...the lady that announces the start and finish told everyone else to keep crawling because she said Kylie didn't win...huh? She said the judges decided that she was disqualified because she didn't have her knees on the mat and that she had to use her knees. So we took her back to the start and she continued to do the bear crawl. I think some parents were saying their kids weren't crawling because the mats were too hot, so officials decided to flip the mats over and start again. Once again, Kylie decided to do it her way :) Love that baby so much!!!

Ha..on a kind of funny note, the kiddo that they say won her heat just used his arms and scooted on his belly, and the mom next to me said, "hey, he didn't really win then because he didn't use his knees." She was trying to make me feel better, and nice enough to see that it was silly of them to disqualify her. How do you really disqualify a baby anyhow...oh well. Don't worry I booed when they said she didn't qualify to win...yes, real mature I know, but that's okay by me :)

So yeah, I got a taste of what it will be like to see my baby against other kiddos and how you want things to be fair, and them to have an equal chance, and how she shouldn't be disqualified for doing things different. The good thing is that these are the easy times, the times when she is young enough and doesn't really care about what happened or how people see her. I'm just guessing it only gets tougher as they get older, and wow I'm gonna need to do a lot of deep breathing and biting my tongue, and having Matt hold me back..lol

Hey guys, I remembered some pics were taken of us and Kylie at the Spinach Fest (from a local guy that takes pics of events in Lenexa), and I just found a bunch on the website. I tried to title them, but here's a quick run through of what happened:

She starts out chasing dad's cell, then gets it at the end and stands up to celebrate, then dad is so excited that she won (he didn't notice their announcement), then we have her at the start again, (she's in the far back), and then she decides this is boring, so she goes to investigate what is going on with the baby next to her.