Nine, Yes, NINE Months

This girl just keeps growing! How do we have a nine month old already?! A delightfully sweet nine month old at that. Gosh, we love her!

This month has flown by quickly. It seems like I just wrote about her eight month accomplishments last week (I guess it doesn't help that I got those up late). While my last post was full of developments, this month she's been taking things easy. Okay, not easy but she focused her energy on a few things instead of several. 

Emerson Jane is 20.4 lbs and 28.5 inches long! She's finally dropped to the 90th percentile in both areas. She is working very hard (much to her disdain) on crawling on her hands and knees. She's come along, but still does a combination of creeping and crawling which ironically looks a little worm like. She does not love to work on crawling but I'm a stickler for the developmental stages (having worked with enough pediatric occupational therapists who drilled in the developmental importance of crawling... although apparently that is not a universally accepted idea e.g., this and this). At any rate, baby girl gets held a lot so we try to encourage her to play on the floor a little every day. It's good for her and it's good for us because it gets us down there playing together as a family. 

What Emerson still loves to do (and what she'd rather do over crawling) is standing and walking around the furniture. She can pull herself up on shorter items, like her Zany Zoo play cube or book basket and from there sometimes she'll get to some furniture. She loves to 'walk' from end to end of the living room furniture. She carefully maneuvers the change from chair to table to couch to table to chair and back again. Or she just goes round and round the ottoman. She's getting pretty good at stepping, and will shakily 'walk' if you hold her hands. She can slide off the couch or ottoman, but I don't think she realizes she's doing it (daddy found this out) because she'll fall off too if she's not lined up right. She still has a ways to go before really walking but it's fun to see her enjoy herself so much.

Another milestone was the arduous work of cutting her first top tooth! There were a few sleepless nights thanks to that one (and the second one is following suit). That chomper took forever to finally come through.

She's also just recently expanded her babbling. She can finally say 'dada' (although it sounds a little like 'gaga' sometimes. She also started variegated babbling and telling longer stories. 'mama' and 'baba' are still her favorites though :) and sometimes 'ma ba ma'

While I love taking her monthly pictures, I can tell this is going to be increasingly difficult each month. I also have fewer and fewer to sort through because I don't take as many.. so maybe it's not all bad. It's so fun to look back and see the expressions and nuances that characterized her at the time.

Here are the highlights:

Just to scare the poo out of mommy...

Daddy came home!

She can still pull out a pouty face in 0.01 seconds flat.

I love her sweet chubby cheeked profile.

 And then... a rare thing happened.. she fell asleep and I could move her AND make camera noises...