Nine Months Old!

Can you believe Nadia is 9 months old already??? In terms of sleeping, she's still taking 3 naps a day which usually total 3-3.75 hours. Her bedtime is usually between 7:00-7:30pm. The time she first wakes up varies between about 5:15-6:00am, but usually she doesn't start fussing until sometime between 6:00-6:30am. Her body didn't switch when we were in Chicago. According to CST she was waking up between 4:15-4:45am, which wasn't fun for Mommy! There was one morning there though that she went back to sleep and didn't wake up again again until 5:50 (which was almost 7am EST which was great!). She generally sleeps 10-11 hours straight at night but is usually in her crib for 11 to 11 1/2 hours. Nadia usually wakes up in a happy mood, and usually there is very little or no crying involved when she goes to sleep although sometimes she cries for a few minutes before falling asleep. The routine is that I read her several books (seated in the glider in her room) and then sing her a few songs. She often rests her head on my shoulder and sucks her thumb during some of the song time which I love.

In terms of eating, her most favorite food right now is a banana. She gets sooo excited when she sees one. Her arms start flapping, her mouth opens wide, and she even will squeal with delight. It's easy to feed her cottage cheese, yogurt, carrots, corn, and applesauce. She also loves mashed potatoes if they are flavored in some way. She loved Aunt Wendy's which were made with red potatoes and had some skin in them and were flavored with garlic. It takes more effort to get her to eat peas, green beans, and oatmeal (the non babyfood kind anyhow - the baby oatmeal cereal goes down easily). Puffs still are useful in getting her to eat something she's not as crazy about. She now feeds herself an entire piece of zwieback toast with her breakfast. She really enjoys that also. I'd like to transition her from Puffs to Cheerios in the next couple of weeks as they're a lot cheaper although they were worth their weight in gold on the airplane!!! After she finishes this box of zwieback toast I also plan to transition her to regular toast. We haven't had much success yet with the sippy cups. I hope we make progress with that this month. One last food related item would be that I really missed the Bjorn bib when we were in Chicago. It's the best bib when eating solids! I'll be bringing it along on future trips. Thanks again, Lucia!!

Recently I started having her play in her pack & play for 30 minutes a day while I'm in another room (such as the kitchen) getting some work done. It took some time to work her up to 30 minutes, but now she'll usually play happily by herself with some toys with some music on in the background. At all other times she prefers to be STANDING. She loves to stand in front of the toybox, at her little "step," or by her window. We have the music cube and music table near that window so she often walks between the three things and takes turns playing with each. Her attention span for books has also greatly improved. Reading about 6-8 books at a time is the norm these days. Now that she is traveling greater distances at a greater speed (no more going backward - she definitely knows how to go forward), I need to do some babyproofing as for example yesterday she discovered a stack of textbooks I was reviewing to select one for a new course I'm teaching in the fall. I need to do some babyproofing!

Here are two clips showing her mobility this morning - crawling and standing. Enjoy! :-)