The First Time He Climbed the Rocky Steps
My son was seven months old when he climbed the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps from top to bottom — fifteen minutes of pure distraction, zero fear, and the beginning of something.
He was seven months old. Not quite sitting up on his own yet, not quite crawling — somewhere in that in-between stage where they're figuring out what their body can do. I was holding him at the top of the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps and thought: let's find out.
Fifteen minutes.
Not because the steps are hard for a seven-month-old — they're actually not, each step is roughly the height of his shin and he can manage fine. But he kept getting distracted. We'd get down two steps and he'd notice a pigeon. Three steps and he'd want to look at a person walking by. He'd reach for a leaf. Turn around to see where we were. Down four more steps, stop, look at something else, try to grab a railing, lose interest, keep going.
No fear. That was the thing I kept noticing. Each step was new and he just went for it — reaching down with both hands, finding the edge, putting his weight down, moving forward. He wasn't thinking about height or fall risk or the fact that he's seven months old doing something that seems impossible for someone that young. He just went. I was more careful than he was.
A woman on the steps asked if he was really climbing them.
I said yes.
She watched for a second and said something like: well, he's got the right attitude. I think she meant it as a joke but I took it as a real observation. Not knowing enough to be scared of what he was attempting seemed like an advantage, not a liability.
By the bottom we were both sweating — him from the effort, me from the attention required. He sat in the stroller, watched the city for a while, then fell asleep. Fifteen minutes of climbing. Zero hesitation. Complete absorption in the task.
He doesn't remember it, obviously. But I think about that first descent sometimes — the way he just went without the mental overhead of deciding whether it was possible. He doesn't know what he doesn't know. And so he just does the thing.
The steps are now a regular stop on a longer Fairmount loop — Smith Playground, the Art Museum steps, and Spring Garden is the version of the route with the kid at toddler age.
I’ve written about the same posture with his blocks and towers at home — build, knock down, build again. The stairs are just bigger blocks.