My 9 Month Old Girl

This picture taken this Sunday. It's our 5th family picture in 9 months. Pretty sad!

Kate turned 9 months today. These last few weeks she has really started to look older. I guess cutting two teeth can make a girl grow up. She is crawling around at twice the speed as when she started. The other morning, I left her in the living room while I finished getting ready. She was "supposed" to be watching a DVD. Ha! I walked out into the living room, and she wasn't there. The first funny thing I did was call her name. What is she going to do? Answer me? I looked in the kitchen, nope. The bathroom, nope. I walked into her room, still no. I then backtracked and saw her in the office. She was sitting there with a sort of guilty look on her face. Her hand held a crumpled piece of paper.

She isn't content hanging out on the floor all of the time. She loves to pull up on anything that looks sturdy enough: her diaper bag, her collapsible laundry bag, the sofa, coffee table, kitchen trash can (ew!!!), mom's bed, anything! She went through a rough time lying down in her crib immediately after she learned to pull up on the slats. I think we've made the transition back to easier bed times now. Tonight I put her in the crib and she just lay there, happy as a clam to be going to sleep. What a relief! I was beginning to despair that my easy to put to bed baby had just had a major personality shift! It had turned some of our sweetest times of snuggling into nightmares. But why should I dwell on something that is hopefully now in the past.

Kate has also made great progress in her diet. She really loves to self-feed, so I try to give her a lot of practice. She loves little peas and small bits of banana, and most recently, bits of bread. She's so proud when she picks up a piece and gets it straight into her mouth. She's also pretty good at tracking a piece if it falls off the high chair. She'll sit there looking over the side like, "Mom, are you going to get it?"

She is taking after some of our Johnson family members and LOVES to play games. The second you say "Peekaboo" she knows what game you are about to play with her. Her cutest peekaboo game is when she gets a ring (from a stacking ring toy) and puts it in front of her face, usually with one eye poking through. She's really got the whole "peeking" thing down. She also loves Pattycake -- she's an accomplished clapper all by herself, but she also loves holding mom's hands and making them clap. Her latest fun trick is playing with one of my touristy Mexican toys. It's a wooden cup with a ball attached to it. An adult tries to hold the cup and get the ball on a string to jump into the cup. (I know that is a really BAD explanation, but it should suffice for those of you who have actually SEEN one.) Kate has started grabbing the ball and dropping it into the cup--quite an accomplishment for someone so young.

Well, that's about it. I should have some more adorable pictures to post tomorrow. (I dropped my film off at Wolf today).