9 Months

SA's 9 month appointment was today - he's 21 pounds 1 ounce and 28 inches, both a bit above average. He grew a fifth tooth this weekend, and at least 2 more seem close.

The last couple weeks have been a flurry of new experiences and skills. The mobility thing is scary for us parents, but he's loving the new corners of the house he can explore. He pulled the bottom rack of the dishwasher in and out repeatedly, until I gave him a pan and a wooden spoon to bang on for a while. He climbed onto the plastic bin where we keep the cat food. He tried to fish around in the toilet before I shut it and moved him back to his play area.

Now that he's pretty good at pulling himself up to standing from most of the pieces of furniture in the house, he's trying to cruise - moving from the piano bench to the Exersaucer to the coffee table. Lots of falling.

And the food... a whole new world of food has opened up. Last night I gave him squash risotto, just to see how he would react. He ate about half a cup, after I thought he was done eating for the day. He had a meal of chicken vegetable soup and bread today, and he has started eating yogurt. The doctor says only nuts, egg whites, fish and honey are off limits.

Dad's shoes make pretty good toys.

I got out my old camera for him to play with, since he wouldn't stop grabbing at mine:

One little monkey jumping on the bed!

Note that the bruises on SA's forehead (more visable below) are not from his jumping out of his crib. We're not there yet. They're from other things - for instance, standing while holding the piano bench, grabbing the cat's tail, and not letting go when the cat protests and runs away.

We just try to prevent as many of the bumps as we can, and kiss and make better the ones we can't prevent. I hope that bumps on the head don't slow the process where SA acquires some sense.

Standing

Since last Sunday, SA has spent every spare moment working on getting vertical.

Or crawling over to the cat food and trying to shove handfuls in his mouth before Mom catches up.

Mobile

Over the last week or so, SA seems to have achieved mobility. Sure, he could push himself around a bit before, and in theory he could roll wherever he wanted to go. But in practice, I could leave him in the living room and fix myself a sandwich in the kitchen, and as long as I checked every half minute or so, he wasn't too far from where I left him.

Now I need to take him to the kitchen with me, or else he wanders unpredictably. Using real, traditional crawling, on hands and knees.

So, we knew we needed to babyproof before. But now we really really need to babyproof. There are little plastic gizmos in sockets. There are covers for power strips, and locks for drawers and cabinets. And, we worked out that the baby gates we inherited from friends won't work on our stairs, so now we have a new set (not yet installed, but they will be tomorrow.)



RB and I intend to put together some music samples at some point, and let people guess... avant-garde jazz or baby pounding piano? Really, it's harder to tell than you'd think.

The toys SA would like to play with most are the things he considers my toys - the phone, camera, and especially the laptop. I spent ten minutes today playing with one of his toys, hoping he'd suddenly find it fascinating. No good.