Nine Months, a Little Late

I just realized that Bridget turned nine months while we were on vacation and I completely forgot to do her update!

Bridget is becoming more and more vocal almost every day. She can now make the sounds MaMa, DaDa, BaBa, NaNa (trust me, no one here is happy she can make a noise that sounds like “no” because she uses it constantly when she is upset “Nanananananananna!”) and now she is saying aT. She’s also stringing more sounds together in new ways. For instance, I heard her a few weeks ago declare her choice for a 2008 presidential candidate - A Ba Ma. My girl supports Obama? Right on! I’ll see if they make a campaign onesie. She is also very clearly understanding when we talk to her. If I say to her, “Bridget, where is DaDa?” she looks directly at him. She doesn’t point at things when you ask her where they are though, although she is constantly pointing at things and babbling. I assume she’s telling us a story about the ceiling a lot. Jake swears that one night on vacation when she woke up in the middle of the night, after having had a bottle and some or@gel, she was whine-crying and pointed at her crib as if to say “please let me go back to bed now.” I don’t know if I buy it, though.

The motion. The constant motion. Oh my god, the constant motion. She is so quick! I set her down on the bathroom floor the other night, hung up her towel and turned back to her and she had the little plastic thing that covers the bolts that attach the toilet to the floor in her mouth. Nice. Luckily no one ever uses the toilet in her bathroom so the toilet parts stay pretty clean in there. In a flash she can grab just about anything I don’t want her to grab. She also does not want to sit still for anything. Not a diaper change, not a feeding, not to get her nails trimmed. It makes all those tasks very difficult as you might imagine. In fact at bedtime, right up until the moment I lay her down in her crib, she is trying to climb up me. Then she collapses dead asleep pretty much right after she lays down. It’s no wonder she’s small - she really does burn up every single extra calorie she takes in.

She pulls up on everything and I mean everything. But she doesn’t express much interest in walking. Even when we hold her hands she doesn’t really want to “walk”. I have caught her a few times trying to pull herself up to a standing position without the aid of a table or a chair or a cabinet. So far she hasn’t mastered it, but I know it’s only a matter of time. I’m not sure if I dread or look forward to walking.

The last new development is teething. She has started the process, but we are almost two weeks in and no tooth has made its debut yet. But thankfully she doesn’t seem to be too much in pain anymore. I just wish it would hurry up and pop through. I kind of want to see her with her one little snaggle tooth.

I’ll leave you with this. Today we are getting Bridget’s nine-month pictures taken. This will be the first in the series where she is clothed so I had to find her something cute to wear. Our photographer recommends solid colors rather than patterns because they photograph better. So here is what I bought her:

I fell in love with this dress at Gymb@ree a few weeks ago but was not at all willing to pay $30 for a dress for an infant. See, I don’t believe in dressing my kid in fussy expensive clothes. She will invariably ruin them with puke or food. She doesn’t like to have outfits on and quite frankly, I prefer to save my money for the days when she will actually care what she wears. For right now, Car.ters, Tar.get, and Old Na.vy clothes do just fine. She has some Ra.lph Lau.ren outfits that I found on sale, but I never buy that crap at full price. Anyway, when I realized the picture was coming up and we needed a solid color dress, I immediately thought of this one. As luck would have it, it was on sale and then had an additional 20% off so I got it for less than half its original price. I love a bargain! And it’s a good thing, too, because I know she will probably never wear this again. Dresses are completely impractical for babies who crawl and unless there is some sort of party that comes up in the near future, this will soon end up in the pile of things to send to Auntie Helen for her little girl. But I can’t wait to see her in it today!

All in all, month nine has been quite active. I’m adapting too, just not as quickly as she is. But however exhausted I am at the end of a day with her, she can always make me laugh. Man, I love this kid. I don’t know what we ever did before she got here.

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