9 Months Old!

I absolutely cannot believe I’m the mom of a 9-month-old little dude.  Fastest and best 9 months of my life; I am so thankful for a great pregnancy, but he’s so much more fun on the outside!

I feel like nothing has changed and at the same time EVERYTHING has changed.  His transitions from each milestone to the next are so smooth and almost seamless, so it feels like he’s always been pulling himself up on the coffee table.  Like he came out of the womb that way or something!  Right now he’s working on trying to pull up on anything and everything, realistic or not, and if he’s not crawling somewhere or standing up he’s probably throwing a fit because he’s not doing one of those two.  All the dude wants to do is be an independent walker!

Another big development is that he just cut his first tooth last weekend!  I wasn’t sure if he was ever going to have teeth – my mom and I joke that we had to look into baby dentures – but lo and behold there’s a little tooth poking through on his lower gums.  He’ll bite into a cup or something and constantly has his hand in his mouth feeling and figuring out what it is.

With this whole tooth business we’ve been working on “brushing” his mouth with a washcloth, which he hates of course, and trying new foods.  It’s an interesting time with food by the way; he still likes eating but he’s wanting larger pieces of food (i.e. a whole mini muffin, not torn into bite-sized pieces) because he likes biting into it.  Honestly he’s really good at the whole bite-chew-swallow thing, although I am constantly nervously watching and making sure there’s no gagging going on.  Nothing just yet anyway!

 

He’s also decided that nursing just doesn’t work for him anymore, which has been a little hard for me.  I’m not upset about giving him formula, but the bonding that comes from nursing…well, I miss it.  He basically has weaned himself down to nursing 1-2 times a day max and the rest of his liquid nutrition is coming from pumped milk or formula.  At first it was hard physically for me, but now we’re doing OK with it.

Toys-wise his favorite things are: remotes with the batteries removed, old cell phones that are turned off, his baby-sized hangers and plastic cups.  Notice a trend there?  He does love to play with his designated toys, but anything that’s not a toy is more likely to hold his attention.  I think Nate and I are going to just wrap empty boxes for him for Christmas…yes, really.  It’s all he’ll care about from us anyway!

Finally let’s chat about sleep.  YIKES.  Homeskillet is still waking up 1-2 times a night (those are the nursing times coincidentally) and we are working on some sleep training, but nothing seems to have worked just yet.  Most nights he’s waking up around 3:30 or 4:30am and then sleeping until around 6:30 or 7, but there are definitely some nights where he just doesn’t want to sleep, like last night.  Part of me believes that it has to do with the teething situation, which we’re handling with Orajel/Children’s Tylenol/homeopathic teething pills as recommended by our pediatrician.  So we’re working through it and could use good vibes coming our way 😉

 

As I said before, these 9 months have been so fun and I can’t believe how they’ve flown by.  I’m surprised and so blessed how much being a mom has suited me; it’s not that I thought I would be a bad mother, but I was never around young children or babies a lot growing up so I had no idea how I would handle it.  It’s incredible though, and I can’t wait for the next however many months and years to come!

 

**All photos for this month are from Instagram…turns out that chasing him around the house with a camera is harder than I thought ;)**