Today’s the day! 9 months old, three-quarters of a year! That means only one quarter left until she turns one! 9 months is  hard one on me. It seems like the changeover from little baby to big baby. Now she’s closer to a toddler than a newborn, closer to walking than crawling, closer to talking than babbling.

So where are we at 9 months?

Physically: Addison is still growing, although I think her growth has finally slowed a bit. She has the chubbiest cheeks and this HUGE Buddha belly that hangs over her diaper, we just love it! She is now 19 lbs and 27.5 inches. She wears a size 12 month although when she stands, the 9 month clothing is the perfect length. She still wears her 0-6 month Robeez but her head is now HUGE. I can’t believe we had trouble finding her hats that would fit her tiny head in Vietnam. Now she is wearing hats in a size 12-18 month! Yay for brain growth! She has two little teeth on the bottom that she is happy to use. We think she is back to teething, hard, and might pop out all four top teeth pretty soon. She has managed to escape catching any of the viruses that have gone through our family, miraculously. Especially considering how many kisses she receives daily!

Large Motor: It is insane to think that just 3 months ago, she could not even sit up, we held her like a newborn. She has come so far. Now she crawls on all fours, like crazy. She will “run” from us if we chase her and she couples her crawling with the random bear-crawl (crawling with her feet flat on the ground). She has done a few Vietnam-style squats lately but does not trust her balance. She has also stood unassisted a few times now but won’t do it if we aren’t right there to help start her off and catch her when she falls. She pulls up on everything now and just started really cruising today! She can get around to anywhere she needs to go. Which means she is now into chasing the dogs and watching her is a full time job. It is amazing to see her standing and getting around even though it is age-appropriate. It just seems like so far from where we were just 3 months ago.

Small Motor: She is adding new “baby games” to her repertoire all the time. She loves to clap, nod, shake her head ‘no’ and sometimes play peek-a-boo. She is learning to blow kisses and play pattacake. She can feed herself anything, anywhere, anytime. The girl likes to eat! She has no food preferances at all except “whatever Mom & Dad are eating”. Anything goes and she has no problems eating just about anything now. Today we are going to start giving her meat so we’ll see how she does with that.

Personality: She has developed a love of music over the last month. Now she dances, she sings, she plays and bangs and loves anything with noise. I’ve never had a baby who dances or sings before! One thing she does NOT do is let me teach her how to use her toys. She is not interested. I show her where the balls go in her alligator ball toy or the peekablocks in her bus and she turns her nose up and crawls away. She has firmly grasped the concept of object permanence and knows where things have gone when they fall out of sight. She didn’t get this at all last month at this time. Also she is getting to be a pretty good problem solver: last night she saw a toy she wanted underneath a door and knew to go around to the other side of the door to retrieve it when trying to pull it through from underneath failed. I just find this age so fun - she has all these little anticipatory games she loves us to play with her and just cracks up and has the best time. She is really fun. And as mentioned before, she already has preferences about her clothes. She just loves anything frilly and swooshy to dance around in. She is totally in love with her siblings, especially Dalton who routinely steals her away from us and will make the world’s best babysitter soon!

Sleep: No updates here. Her sleep still stinks. She is still up for 3 bottles in the night. Blah. Yawn. She has added this lovely night waking thing to her repertoire, I’m sure no thanks to our late night American Idol marathons, haha. But it is random and no fun. Also right now she is sharing a room with a constantly-coughing child and it wakes her up all night long. No fun for any of us. She’ll be sleeping through the night by 10 months, right?

Eating: I touched on this already but she is still drinking a lot of bottles during the day, probably at least 32 ounces, although I think she is slowly decreasing thing is favor of solid foods. Hopefully this trend will continue and we can switch her to rice milk when she turns one. I really hate having her on the lactose formula becuase I think she is sensitive to it but more than that, I really dislike soy and will do anything to keep her from consuming mass quantities of soy so it will be nice when she is older to have an alternative until we can determine if she can really handle the lactose or not. She is still nursing for comfort whenever she wants. Right now she nurses before every bottle (at least when I’m home). She is still very oral. She sucks her thumb when Daddy holds her and in the night. She sucks everything else all the rest of the time. The other day we caught her licking the glass on our office door. Right now, as I type, she’s licking and sucking the telescope in our office. And now when she gets something off limits in her mouth, she books it to escape with the contraband! She does not give it up willingly!

I can’t wait to see what 10 months brings!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 8:08 pm and is filed under Adoption, Parenting, Photos & Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.