All the sudden my little baby is seeming more and more like a little girl every day. This month I feel like she exploded with progress, especially on the motor skills and physical front.
Even though at the beginning of the month she was already pulling to standing, there is such a difference now.
She can easily pull to standing and also can get down from standing into a sitting position. She also likes to stand between two things and do a 360, completely turning around, by holding each thing (like ottomans or laundry baskets). She can climb ramps or small stairs (yikes), and crawls fast now.
We also got her a walker and she's mastered walking all over the kitchen in her walker, which is pretty hilarious to watch. She is extremely active.
Allie is definitely showing us that she knows what we are saying a lot now. If you ask her to hand you something, she will and likes the game of passing it back and forth. She loves picaboo (has for a long time), loves watching me dance and sing to her, loves being bounced up and down, loves getting raspberries on her cheeks and belly. It's so so cute to watch her laugh at things.
Allie really had fun doing a lot of fall activities this month. She went to a pumpkin patch for the first time!
She also had her first Halloween in which she dressed up as a lady bug at both our neighborhood parade and a Halloween party with friends and other babies.
Allie is still exploring food. We introduced her to several meats this month. Her favorite is chicken, by a landslide, but she's also tried fish, turkey, and pot roast. She's tried new stuff like spaghetti with sauce, hummus, kiwi, graham crackers, muffins, and raspberries. Food is kind of hit or miss for her. Her favorite foods are butternut squash, puffs, pears, and yogurt (coconut milk yogurt). Allie is getting more interested in feeding herself, and with that I'm finding it harder to spoon feed her things she used to like, so that can be frustrating. She's most successful feeding herself butternut squash (cooked, soft chunks), puffs, and Cheerios, but we're trying new things all the time. We still do purees (I still make a lot) too, and sometimes they go over well, sometimes not. It just depends on Allie's mood.
I don't think I've mentioned it yet, but we found out Allie has a mild milk allergy. We had given her small amounts of yogurt and ice cream and noticed a rash around her mouth, so we took her to the doctor and she recommended Allie have a blood draw to be tested for the milk allergy. This is bad news to me since I LOVE ice cream. We are getting referred to an allergist to further explore this, but for now milk products are out. The good news is we've successfully given Allie coconut and soy yogurt and ice cream. We are really hoping she grows out of this and can have milk and milk products in the future though. I guess we'll know more about what to expect once we see the allergist.
Allie is super interactive now. She shrieks with delight if you call to her and smile from across the room. Every time I pick her up at daycare she loses her mind with delight, but will completely melt down in the two seconds it takes me to collect her things once she sees me from inside the play area. She laughs and smiles and everyone says she smiles with her eyes. She is a true joy and watching her get excited, smile, and laugh is the best thing ever.
Sleep is going pretty good. We had a fairly rough daylight savings week, with a couple wake-ups before 5am, but she usually sleeps through the night and is just up really early most mornings. I feel like she's still pretty unpredictable. Some nights she'll sleep all night, sometimes up once a night for a feeding, some nights (like last night), she's up more than once a night if she's really thrown off. Last night I gave up trying to get her back to sleep in the crib (she'd cry as soon as I put her down) at 4am and let her sleep with me. It's rare that happens though.
Allie got in visits with both sets of grandparents this month. Greg's parents were here at the beginning of October for a long weekend, and Allie went to see my parents at the beginning of November.
As for her stats, she is in size three diapers, and wearing 6M, 6-9, and 9M clothes.
At her 9 month check up:
Weight: 15.6 lbs (5-10th percentile) TINY!
Length: 27 inches (25-50th percentile)
Head: 44.5 cm (50-75th percentile)
I'll admit, her weight surprised me. She's always been on the smaller side for weight, but less than 16 lbs at nine months seems so small! I was guessing she was about 17 lbs now based on her eating solids and breast milk. I think maybe because she is so mobile now she is burning a lot of calories. Anyway, her pediatrician is not worried about it at all and showed us that she is totally in the normal range for her growth and for an exclusively breast fed baby. I'm trying not to worry about it. It's not like she looks skinny or anything, she looks like she has a normal amount of baby fat.
The only other concern we have at all with Allie is that she's not using consonant sounds much like "ma ma, da da, or ba ba". We actually think we're partly to blame because we have let her have the pacifier so much, so the pediatrician said to try not letting her use it as much and try repeating those sounds in front of her a lot and hopefully within the next month she will pick them up. She makes lots of "Eeeeeeee!" and "Arrrhhhhh" noises, but just not a lot of consonant sounds. I am also hoping it's partially that she's so focused on moving with all the crawling and standing she's doing that she doesn't work on talking as much.
I am feeling good lately. Still tired and never feeling caught up on things, but I feel good overall. I feel like I'm getting the hang of work/life/baby/house/marriage more and more each day which makes me happy. I've even been running some. Usually only about two mile runs about twice a week (with or without the jogging stroller), but it's something.
I can't believe we're in the home stretch to a year now. Crazy...
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