Tuesday, August 10, 2010

9 Months - Time For Change (Updated)

My baby girl has now been my baby girl for as long as I was pregnant with her.

Wow.

Today Kaycie flipped the calendar to 9 months old. We went to her check up and she's been deemed perfectly healthy and a child giant. Her weight didn't go up as much as I thought it would, she was just under 21lbs which puts her in the 85 percentile. That's the first time she's been under the 90th percentile since she was born, and I'm sure all the extra exercise from crawling around looking for trouble helped! She measured in at 30 inches, which was off the chart. Literally, doc said they called it "greater than 95th percentile." That explains the jump to size 18 month pants a couple of weeks ago.

She has done so much in the past month, it's hard to capture it all. She had her first lesson about hats. Hats are defined as anything you can put on your head. She didn't much like her first lesson.



Later lessons went much better. She liked this hat, probably because it matched her outfit so well.




She also had the opportunity to hang out with two of her namesakes, Aunt Kay and Sharonda (also a Kay). I think Kaycie is going to find that she has been named after quite a few amazing women.



Since she's started crawling we have been having all kinds of fun playing chase around the house. Kaycie usually catches me, which means standing up beside me while I'm on my hands and knees, and beating me in the back. I'll cry out, "Attack!" and she'll usually respond with a battle cry of, 'AAAAAHHHH!" It's ridiculously funny.

She is also getting into trouble going and coming. She loves to pull up on things that aren't sturdy and a we've taken a few tumbles. Greg and I have decided that our goal as parents is to keep as much of her blood inside her as possible. I haven't felt like I've done a very good job of that this past month, as she took two spills that resulted in busted lips. The first one was pretty bad, not long after she started pulling up she tried to pull up on our bed by grabbing the sheet, slipped and hit the bed rail with her face. There was much crying and more blood than I care to think about now. I think that was her first lesson that mobility is a dangerous thing. I wish I could protect her better, but she has a little bit of an adventurous spirit that sometimes leads to pulling a side table down on her head. These things are going to happen.

She's also started standing up for several seconds on her own without support. I wonder if I will be writing about her walking in my next update post...

Her favorite toys right now are balls, anything that plays music that she can dance too (that girl LOVES to dance!), the thermostat, light switches, door knobs, and the curtains over the back door which are perfect for peek-a-boo. Her nemesis is wash cloths. She like to bend them to her will then use them as weapons. And of course to play peek-a-boo.

The next few weeks will likely prove to be a challenge for us all. She's still not sleeping well most night and that's going to have to change. We're going back to gremlin rules - no feeding after midnight. She's not going to like it, since she's been having a mid morning snack between 1 and 4am most mornings. Doc said it time for her to suck it up, in part because it's time to lose the bottle. Kaycie is very attached to her bottle. Like, time for a 12 step program attached. So as we move her off formula and onto milk over the next few weeks we're also moving her off the bottle and onto a sippy. She's been drinking water from a sippy with her meals for a couple of months and likes it fine, but it's not her bottle and she doesn't usually drink as much from it as she will a bottle. I don't know how she will take to milk - she's been on soy formula because she had a lot of tummy issues with milk early on - but we're will be finding out tomorrow morning. Hopefully it'll work out fine and we can expand her diet to include all kinds of fun dairy. She needs to have some ice cream! And mac and cheese, and just plain cheese, and yogurt... So many new things waiting for her. Oh, and she's pretty much done with baby food. She's a big girl, she wants to feed herself things like carrot sticks and diced fruit and sweet potato chunks and my toast. I can't imagine how I'll get enough food in her to survive once we're done with formula. It takes her forever to eat!

I can't believe the first time I posted this I forgot to mention her four new teeth, all of which arrived within 48 hours of each other. And her doc said she thinks a couple more are on their way. Don't kids start popping teeth out without even thinking about it at some point? Let's hope so, because Kaycie will have a mouth full in about a week at this rate. AND didn't mention that she's finally started babbling. She was down with the "ma-ma-ma" a couple of weeks ago, but then she learned the "bwa-bwa-bwa" and the "ma-ma-ma" was so last week. I've been desperately trying to get her to do the "da-da-da' but she's not into that yet.

For the record, I went back and updated that last paragraph (twice) not because I really think anybody cares, but because this is my record of her progress, and the way I'm keeping up with all the new things she's learning. I usually do these later at night after she's in bed, so I'm exhausted and forget a lot. When I think of important things later, I'll go back and add them for my own record.

Finally, I have about a dozen posts I want to do about things that are pretty much not at all related to Kaycie, things like trying to sell our house and the crazy things related to that. Things like the fact that she's napping well enough for me to be reading some great books again. Things like the fact that my parents bought a motor home, and I think that's awesome. Things like the fact that I've been off my ADD meds for two years now and how I'm managing. Things like how we're certifiably insane for planning a trip to Disney World for Kaycie's first birthday (we're soooo taking a set a grandparents!). I need to make a point, at least once a week, to reserve a nap time to sit and write. I miss blogging so much, but it's habit that it's too easy to fall out of when you're not sitting at a desk at work all day! =)

I can't leave a Kaycie update post with that, so instead I'll leave with one of my favorite pics of the past month. She's almost perfected her pitiful:

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