Today is Alethea’s nine-month birthday.  Happy birthday, Baby!

This is also my 100th post on BobbleHeadBaby.com.  Thanks for sticking around everyone who is still reading!

This morning we went to Alethea’s nine month well baby check up.  After checking her height/weight/head size, the doctor told me her current stats are: Height – 27 inches, Weight – 20 lbs 14oz, Head Circumference – 44.5 cm.  That means Alethea has dropped to the 25th percentile for height while maintaining 90th for weight.  Her head circumference is a respectable 75th percentile.

Alethea’s big first this month was her first time walking around while holding on to furniture.  She started doing that in the middle of the month and has rapidly been perfecting it ever since.  Most of her day is spent on her feet now, since she will only get down to crawl when she needs to get to the next piece of furniture she wants to stand up on.  I’m continually amazed what she can use to pull herself up, closet doors, tall pieces of furniture, even air vents on the wall!  I have yet to see her stand up using only a bare wall, but I’m thinking that may just be because there is nothing interesting enough on a bare wall to entice her into climbing it.

We reached another milestone this month that isn’t nearly as exciting.  Alethea somehow learned to throw fits when she doesn’t want to slow down from her playing long enough to get dressed, get her diaper changed, take a nap, put her coat on, take her medicine, etc.  It makes each day feel like a bit of a wrestling match and I am trying to strike a balance between making the above activities fun and distracting without going overboard in making Alethea feel that everything we do during the day must be to her exact specifications (I wonder where she gets that from…)

On a more pleasant note, Alethea has learned to wave “bye-bye” and it is cute to watch her interacting and communicating more and more with the people in her life.  She sometimes says ‘hi’, ‘da-da’, ‘mama’ and ‘go’ at appropriate times, but since she also says them in contexts where they don’t work, I’m still not sure if they are ever on purpose yet.

Overall, this month has been a little rough since for most of it Alethea was not sleeping or eating well.  She was also drooling a lot, although no new teeth came through.  However, when the doctor looked into her mouth today, our pediatrician noticed that there are four swollen lumps on Alethea’s upper gum line, so it looks like we are expecting four teeth soon, which is probably the reason behind the sleeping and eating regression.  The past few days/nights have been better on both counts, so hopefully we’ll have a little respite from teething for the time being.

I guess to sum up, this past month has been tiring.  Having tantrums and teething to contend with at the same time has not made me feel like the mother of the year.  Still, Peter and I are both enjoying playing with Alethea more since she is a lot more interactive and coordinated enough to enjoy more physical play like dancing and being tossed into the air.  Just tonight she was “jumping” (with a little help from me) and she thought that was outrageously funny.

Well, I think that about covers it.  Thanks again for reading!

Lately Alethea has had a really runny nose and has been drooling so much that the whole bottom half of her face looks like a wet slick.  I try to stay clear of it and wipe her face a whole lot, but I have been doing a lot of laundry lately.

I’m thinking she may be teething again, although I can’t tell if there are any more teeth coming through.  She does love chewing on things though, and no one and nothing is immune, not even Peter Rabbit:

Where’s Alethea?

There she is!

Where did Alethea go?  I can’t find her anywhere!

There she is again!  Amazing!

Thanks to Grandma Debbie for taking this great video of Alethea climbing.  And just so you know, the best part is the ending, so watch the whole thing! (It’s less than a minute long.)

Yesterday Peter and Alethea were playing with her Leap Frog music table.  Alethea had her hand on the green piano key, so it kept saying, “Green, green, green” over and over.  Without warning Alethea opens her mouth and says “Green.”  Clear as a bell, without a doubt, she said “Green”.

I was astounded because it was so plainly a word.  So, I said to Peter, “I can’t believe Alethea’s first word is ‘Green’.”  (Because of course I always assumed her first word would be “Mommy”, “Daddy” or “Up”, you know, something to do with her growing relationship with her fabulous parents, but I digress.)

But then Peter said, “It doesn’t count, though.  She was only repeating the sound the toy was making.  She doesn’t even know what ‘Green’ is.”

So what do you all think?  Does saying ‘green’ go in the category of ‘just happened to make the sounds of a real word’ along with Iowa, hi, Ohio, Dada and other things that have come out of her mouth without her knowing the meaning?  Or does ‘green’ count as her first word since she was repeating what she heard, not just babbling out random sounds?

So Alethea has made major strides in her crawling and pulling herself up on furniture skills the past few days.  Just about an hour ago I was cleaning up after lunch while Alethea played with her toys in the living room and when I turned around, I realized I could see her little face looking over at me from our trunk coffee table.  She was standing next to it!  I didn’t know she could pull up on anything that high off the ground, but I guess she can!  Yikes!

I feel like I can hardly look away from her because she can now get up on stuff, but she doesn’t know how to get back down without hurting herself.  Not only that, but she has the typical “kid radar” that aims her at anything in the house that I’d rather she not play with.  Today she’s made it her mission to explore the wine rack in the dining room.  Not ’till you’re 21, Sweetie!

I’m tired of running after her already and she’s not even that fast yet!  Whew!

It makes it all worth it though when she crawls over and pulls herself up onto my lap (even if it is only because she wants to eat my sweatshirt strings!)