Ninth month recap..

What a fun age this is!  Baby Girl lights up our house with her smiles, giggles, and squeals and continues to be the greatest blessing of our lives. 

Weight: 19 lbs 5 oz

Height: 29 1/4 inches

Napping: Two naps a day.  She typically goes down for her morning nap anywhere from 9-10am, depending on when she woke up that morning.  Her afternoon nap begins in the 1:30pm time frame.  Her naps last anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours, with her norm being about 1 hour 15 minutes.

Night:  Praise God we have a sleeper again!!  It took one gut-wrenching night for Mommy (Daddy didn't seem so bothered by it), but we survived and we have had a "through the night" sleeper ever since!  We decided to go cold turkey and let her cry it out, and it worked like a charm!  Andy went in every 30 minutes to verbally comfort her, but we never picked her up or fed her. (He then returned to bed to remind me that I was not a bad mother!) She persisted for 2 hours that first night, but she eventually fell back to sleep and has only awoken in the night sporadically since then.  Bedtime remains 7ish and she wakes in the 7-7:30am timeframe to start the new day.

Food: This is a fun category now!  Finger foods have become a staple in her diet and she loves to feed herself.  Things she feeds herself (in small chunks) include: banana, pineapple, cantaloupe, watermelon, Cheerios, Rice Krispies, avocado, cooked chicken, crackers, puffs, sweet potatos, green beans, and carrots.  We are adding new foods each week and she loves it!  She also still eats homemade and jarred baby food, Yo Baby yogurt, oatmeal, and barley cereal.

Nursing: Four times a day, approximately every 4 hours

Skills: crawls while holding toys in her hands, puts balls into small spaces very well (e.g., into the spout of her ball popper), opens cabinet doors, pulls up to her knees all of the time and stays up on her knees without support, puts self to sleep for all naps and bedtime most nights, will look for an item when we hide it from her (e.g., under a blanket), remembers exactly where the cat food bowl is and goes looking for it all the time!, will wave in response to us waving at her,  says 'hi' whenever I talk on my cell phone, has begun to show preference for certain books

Language: says three words 'dada', 'mama' (which warms my heart!), and 'hi' (which is her favorite right now and I hear it hundreds of times a day, along with her adorable wave!), says 'ba' for ball and 'ku' for cat.  She loves to babble and squeal.  Is beginning to sign 'all done', although it is sporadic.

Fun Facts: wears size 3 diapers, likes to chew on her toes, smiles and races over to Andy when he walks in the door from work each day, has begun to eat A LOT more food (we wonder where it all goes!), dances when she hears music, likes to have her ears cleaned out - she just lays still, smiles, and closes her eyes as if thinking 'ahhh, this feels good', we have to trim her nails every single week!, her favorite books right now are 'Elmo - SO BIG!', 'Row Row Row Your Boat', and a Nemo book that makes music (she will give them to you over and over and over to read...), loves balls of all colors and sizes, wears size 12 month clothes and size 3 shoe, sucks/chews on the corners of her blanket to sooth herself to sleep, likes to be outside and go for walks, frequently gets told she looks like the Gerber baby, really likes to have songs sung to her, still only has her two bottom teeth, empties her book bin daily, has begun to play the shy card by burying her head in our shoulder when people greet her in public, and thrives on consitency and routine.