Nine Months Out

Nine months is a special milestone.

When a baby reaches it, I can't help but marvel that approximately the same amount of time has passed that the baby spent in the womb.  In one span of nine months, she grows from just a couple of cells into a ready-to-meet-the-world 8-pound baby; and in the next nine months, she grows from that into this!  :)

She's such a little person now with habits and traits that already make her uniquely Moriah.  Like how she likes to suck on two fingers of her left hand...

...and then...oh, dear...

...stick her pointer finger up her nose!  (It's the classic Moriah pose these days, so I had to include a picture.) :)

Silly girl!  Don't you know it's not polite to do that?!  ;-)

So, who is this nine-month-old sweet bundle of joy?

Well, for one thing, she's still not very mobile.  She can roll from front to back and back to front (and has done that for months), but she doesn't utilize that skill to roll all over the place on the floor to get from one spot to another.  She consistently starts to get up into the classic crawling position on hands and feet, but doesn't stay in the position for long before kind of collapsing onto her tummy.  She does, however, sort of slip and slide and move...but only backwards.  :)  If something is out of reach in front of her, she has to decide to get interested in something else, because stuff in front = unattainable.  She has, however, been known to slide backwards so much that she sort of disappears under the playpen, except for her head that looks out with an inquiring expression to see if anyone will come along and rescue her.  :)

She is on the verge of sitting up on her own, but I don't believe she's accomplished it yet.  If I set her down in a sitting position, she does well with it; and if, after a while, she starts to lose her balance, she knows how to very gracefully fall so that she doesn't get hurt.  I should mention that I almost always set her down with her back against the couch or something like that, so that she can't suddenly lurch backwards and have a hard fall.  If she does topple over, it's a slow-motion descent to one side or the other.

She very much enjoys sitting up by a basket of toys or a box of big, chunky blocks that she can pick up and hold and mouth and bang around.  One thing she got a kick out of recently, when I was working in the kitchen, was sitting in a corner of the kitchen and playing with a new box full of clementines that Jeff had just gotten.  :)

Her favorite playtimes are sitting up beside objects like I just described or standing in the farm toy.  If someone--especially one or more of the boys--are close by, that's even better.  :)

One activity she no longer does is spend time in her swing.  As a matter of fact, we took the swing out of the living room in the early part of December so we could put our Christmas tree in that spot.  For a little while after that, the swing was in our upstairs hallway, and Moriah still spent some time in it; but really it was in the way.  And besides, Moriah was big enough to enjoy other activities and didn't need the swing, so into my parents' basement it went.  Would you call me silly if I said I was a little sad about that?  ;-)

Moriah has reached the stage of having a little separation anxiety when I pass her off to someone else.  Whether it be someone in the church nursery or a family member on the couch after supper, she has been known to make her preference known: she wants me.  :)  So far at church, if she fusses when I take her into the nursery, she stops very quickly after I leave.  The more experience I get as a mom, the more I realize that it's true: time does pass so quickly, this stage will be over before I know it, and I need to treasure each day and not chafe at the restrictions upon me.  So I treasure them, and I don't mind holding Moriah when she wants to be held.  Don't mind it at all.   :)

Moriah is still toothless.  (I can't type that without thinking of the dragon from the movie How to Train Your Dragon.)  ;-)  Every so often, I feel her gums to see if maybe I've missed something and a tooth has begun to poke through, but no, nothing yet.  I've had a child (Shav) get teeth as early as 4 months and another child (David) get them as late as 13 and a half months, so I'm not worried at all about Moriah.  She'll get them when she gets them.  :)

Moriah has had pumped milk in a bottle a few times, but I haven't done much pumping this time around.  I did, however, get a sippy cup for her--one of those with the really soft, easy-to-suck nipples that makes the transition from bottle (or breast) to cup so smooth.  She did great with that from the get-go and drinks some water from that every day.  I plan (realizing that plans can change) to wean her when she's a year, and she'll be able to go straight to drinking cow's milk from a sippy cup at that point.

 As far as food goes, she definitely had a very short baby-food stage.  She was quick to learn to finger feed and was also quick to enjoy multi-textured food, to my surprise.  I remember well one evening when I got out the baby food grinder to mash up some green beans for her, and she turned up her nose at them.  When I put little pieces of green beans on her tray for her to pick up and eat, she gobbled them up.  ;-)  I can't even make a list of what all she's eaten because it's so many different things, but here are some things I remember: rice cereal, baby oatmeal, some baby food (sweet potatoes, carrots, etc.), chunks of bananas, green beans, peaches, black beans, cheese, black and green olives, graham crackers, baby food puffs, cheerios, fruit & grain bars, yogurt, applesauce, etc...plus, little bites of whatever we're having (curried lentils and rice, macaroni and cheese, potato soup, spaghetti, whatever).  She loves big people food, and I'm so grateful for her good appetite!  :)  I meant to weigh and measure her and forgot (of course); but the last time I checked, she was up to about 15 and a half pounds (from 14 and a half at 8 months), which is very reassuring to me after my earlier concern about her lack of weight gain.  I sure am glad I didn't worry about it back then!  ;-)

One of my favorite things to do with Moriah these days is hold her in my arms while I'm singing her lullaby ("A Mother's Prayer"--the Celine Dion version) to her before I tuck her in bed for a nap or at night.  We stand in her room by the wind chimes, and I let her touch them and make them sound.  Often she reaches out tentatively and looks at me while she reaches, as if to ask, "Are you sure it's OK for me to do this?"  :)  Then when she brushes against them and the sound rings out, her eyes light up with sweet, beautiful joy.  It is a precious time.

She is a precious girl!  :)