Lauren 9 month update

Every once in awhile i hear from someone I haven't talked to in awhile who says they follow my blog and that they love to hear how Lauren is doing and feel like they know her through reading her adventures. And at least one friend reads the blog to be amused by Ryan's antics. I can't write about those too much because he told me he checks first thing every morning to see what I've written about him and he seems to be sensitive about it. Let's see if he notices this and tells me.

I will give you this Ryan tidbit-one funny thing he did do last month, luckily I can laugh about it now and not be mad any more, is use my stamp collection to mail a letter. He had to go into my desk to hunt for the stamps, bypassing the current 39 cent stamps that were out on the desk, not bothering asking me if i had any, instead going right for these rare triangle shaped ones from the early 90's. It didn't occur to him that since the value of the stamp was less than 39 cents, they might be old stamps I was saving for a reason. Since they were 30 cents, he had to put 2 on one letter. His response? "I didn't even know you had a stamp collection."

Anyway, back to how his daughter is doing. We took her to her 9 month checkup on Thursday. She is 28 1/2 inches long and weighs 22 pounds, 15 3/4 ounces, which means she has lost a little weight. Her doctor thinks her thighs look thinner, and she'll continue to change shape as she crawls around. She likes to "cruise" by crawling around and pulling herself to standing, then holding on to the couch, chair, whatever, and moving around. She pretty much has to be standing if she's awake.

She loves jokes and she'll laugh right along with us if something is funny. The biggest laughs come from "where's Mommy? here I am!" peekaboo games, and also from when we pretend to nibble on her feet, or tickle under her chin. She craves daredevil activities and getting tossed in the air or bounced. She loves the feeling of wind in her hair, whether from going fast on her little bike, or even us just fanning her. She still likes to pull my hair to go to sleep, but lately she has also been pulling on her own hair, which is only about 1 inch long. We're not sure what color it will be. It's a brownish auburn now, but when my mom (a redhead) is here, we can see that they have the same color eyebrows. She still has her fair skin, lighter than Ryan's but not as pale as mine, but no freckles.

Foodwise, she is still, believe it or not from looking at her, a light eater. She doesn't mind solid food very much anymore but she will only take about 2 ounces or less before she gets full. She doesn't hate rice cereal anymore. She eats that, oatmeal, peas, carrots, sweet potatoes, string beans, and whole grain cereal. Yesterday she ate Cheerios for the first time and it literally took her about 20 minutes to eat 4 Cheerios. She finally got the hang of chewing on them with her 8 teeth. She likes to hold her own sippy cup herself. She loves books, and calls them "boo" which is just prounced exactly like book without the "k" at the end. She also loves to chew on them, and her best loved books ("Who's in the Sea" is her favorite) look like a puppy has gotten to the corners.

This morning when she'd been napping for about 20 minutes, I thought I heard someone talking upstairs, so I went to check. I heard this quiet little voice saying "Mom" and she was awake! Her naps used to be pretty regular at 9:00 and 1:30 but now she sometimes goes longer stretches without them. She still wakes up around 6:45 every morning but we can usually get her to sleep in a little bit on weekends, or at least, to be happy staying in bed making her little noises or playing with the covers until about 7:30. 9:30 is still bedtime but last night she stayed awake playing and exploring until 11:00. She showed no signs of being tired. We had a box of odds & ends from our Christmas stockings which we hadn't put away yet, and she spent a lot of time exploring each new item.