Sometimes I can’t decide if Claire is incredibly lazy, extremely stubborn, exceptionally clever, or all of the above.

Case in point: she never rolls anymore. I know that she is physically capable of doing it, because I have seen her purposely roll both ways several times. But I also know that she does not enjoy it.

Hence, whenever she is in a horizontal position — whether on her back or stomach — she will only withstand it for however long she pleases…then the whining and screaming begins.

(On a related note, did you know that psychologists believe whining may be the world’s most annoying sound?)

No matter how long we try to ignore it, do our best to guide her to roll, sit up on her own, etc, she refuses to budge once she is in this state. It’s like she knows that if she screams long enough, someone is eventually bound to come pick her up.

The upside to her refusing to roll anymore is that we have never had an instance where she screams in the middle of the night, begging to be rescued from whatever precarious/uncomfortable position she has arranged herself in.

Our next challenge comes with crawling. Yes, my daughter will turn 9 months old next week and she is not crawling. She shows no interest in crawling either — believe me, I’ve tried.

I’ve watched YouTube videos on instructing your baby to crawl. I have asked other mothers for advice. I place her favorite toys all around her, just out of reach, so that she needs to at least make the first attempts at crawling in order to get to them.

Do you know what she does instead? She will pull on the blanket/sheet/rug under her and the toys and use it to pull the toys toward her. Or she will use whatever else that is within reach and use that to guide the toys her way.

Last week, I gave her a bottle of pills to distract her for a few minutes while I was on an important phone call. When she couldn’t get the child safety-equipped cap off, she started to drag the edge of the cap against other larger objects around her — a book, her toy mirror, and even poor Comang — as if she were trying to use them as leverage to pop the cap open.

And just now, because a friend had told me that her son had gotten motivated to crawl after seeing other kids crawl, I put her down on the floor in a crawling position and started to crawl myself.

“See, baby?” I said as I started crawling back and forth in front of her. “This is how you crawl…”

She took one look at me and started cracking up. She laughed so hard that she fell from the crawling position, down onto her stomach. As I watched her little body shake uncontrollably in laughter, I couldn’t help but feel like a complete idiot.

I give up. Maybe she’ll be like J and his brother, who never crawled and went straight to walking.

P.S. — I’m a few days late, but here is the Father’s Day e-card we made for J. She was extremely afraid of the balloons, so it took quite some time to get these two photos.