After several days (or perhaps even a week or two) of occasional hovering on her hands and knees baby will set off creeping. Her ability to explore the world has now increased more than tenfold. Now, as a creeper, she has much less drag and potentially greater speed than she ever had as a crawler. At the same time her senses should now be more powerful and her knowledge of the world huge compared to that at the time of her birth. Her natural curiosity about the world and her quest for more knowledge and skills will usually motivate her to creep further every day than she did the previous day. But, until she can balance well enough to creep faster than she can crawl, she will crawl when she needs to hurry. Excited and immersed in the joy of creeping baby will be fairly satisfied with creeping as a method of moving about the world until, at the end of this level, she decides to walk. 

The natural way baby will become an accomplished walker is to creep often every day. She will then develop abilities, such as more accurate balance, that are required to learn to walk. If she is often picked up and carried she could begin to prefer being carried to creeping, just as some adults habitually prefer sitting, or driving, to walking. She might then begin to complain if she is not carried on demand.  The more she is carried the less opportunity she has to creep, and the longer she is likely to take to become a walker, and the lower quality her walking could become. To become an excellent walker (and eventually an excellent runner) almost always requires considerable prior experience as a crawler and as a creeper. To get that practice baby needs to spend most of her time on the floor and definitely not in a bouncer, stroller, walker-trainer or similar apparatus. Every time baby creeps she is a little closer to becoming a walker. When she can creep a total of 360 meters each day then she should become a ‘cruiser’ walker within the next week. ‘Cruising’ is the first stage of walking; when baby stands up and ‘walks’ while holding onto furniture and other objects for support. The total daily distance of 360 meters she can be expected to creep each day before becoming a walker is the total of all the short and long creeps she has in one day. Some of baby’s creeps included in the daily total might be, for example, one meter between a toy frog and a rattle plus ten meters exploring from the kitchen, down the hallway and across the bedroom.

If you want to estimate when baby will begin walking observe how far she creeps for say, 60 minutes, and then multiply that distance by the number of hours she is awake. Then subtract or add any more or less distance you think she will cover during the day. There is no need to follow her with a tape measure but if you measure the hall length and the distance across rooms you can then estimate how far she creeps when, for example, she creeps down the hall three times and across the living room twice. If you want to be more accurate then you might need to set aside one day each week or two to observe and write down how far she creeps during that day. Again, if you know for example the distance down the hall and across the rooms, then you can add those distances together each time she creeps across them. 

Creeping provides baby with good exercise and her lung development is enhanced if she creeps quickly and needs to breathe more deeply as a result. Older siblings can be very helpful by playing creeping races to encourage baby to creep quickly. Parents, of course, can also play creeping-fast games with baby.

Use games such as creeping after a rolling ball or placing interesting objects across the room or in other rooms for baby to creep to. Avoid going to baby when possible and encourage her to creep to you instead. Encourage her to creep about the house instead of being carried by you or others. This might require that you take more time while you wait for baby; but she benefits by creeping further. 

A carpeted floor is preferable for creeping, as it is less likely to hurt baby’s knees than a timber, tiled or similarly hard floor. Beach sand can be a fun creeping surface when she can easily creep about three meters; providing that the sand is not so soft that she bogs down.