9 Months Old

Oh, how difficult it is to take these "birthday" shots now! ;-)

[October 18, 2011]

At 9 months, Marek is climbing (or lifting his leg in an attempt to do so), standing up to EVERYTHING, crawling and getting into EVERYTHING, wrestling with Mom & Dad just to change a diaper or his clothes, crawling or trying to stand up while in the bathtub, biting everything he should not (i.e. electrical cords), and loving his sister.  He's completely obsessed with the vacuum, and when I have it running (which isn't as frequently as it should be), it's a game of how quickly I can vacuum what I need to before he'll get to me.  He has literally broken a sweat while chasing after the vacuum from room to room.

Marek will now wave bye-bye, says "Dada" constantly, says, "Uh oh" every time he drops something after hearing me say it, and will repeat, "Up, up, up" when I tell him that while picking him up.  His shaking his head "no" has returned, and he thinks it's so funny.  One day I was trying to get him to say "Mama" and kept repeating it to him - he shook his head no and kept saying, "Dada".  Little stinker!

He now loves table food - for a little while there I thought we were gonna have some food challenges.  He loves to drink out of a cup all by himself.  He gets very excited when he hears me shaking up his bottle to mix the formula, and will grin and come crawling toward me as fast as he can.  I am still nursing him, but the supply isn't the greatest, so we supplement.  That may stop sooner than I'd like, because his TEETH get in the way!  Speaking of his chompers, as I write this he has 4 teeth, and two more on top are coming through!  He's been sleeping TERRIBLE lately, and I think it's a combination of teething, being sick, and being at a new phase where he cries unless we're by his crib.  We've always been able to just lay him in his crib to go to sleep, and he'd do so on his own.  But we're having a rough go of sleep in the middle of the night right now, and I'm praying it's short-lived while all 3 of these things are playing a factor.  If not, as soon as he gets over this respiratory thing, we need to try Ferberizing him.  That's what our pediatrician recommended.  We'll see what happens.

So Marek had his check-up on October 25, and weighs 23 pounds, and is 28.25 inches.  That puts him in the 92nd percentile for weight still, and his length is in the 52nd percentile.  He's all over the place on that graph now. :-)  His noggin is still big - I think like 97th percentile or something like that.

Marek and his sister have such a special bond.  He just lights up for her, and she can never get enough of him.  Yesterday Ellison told me Marek is her best friend. :-)