9 months old!

In the midst of the unpacking, we paused to celebrate our son’s 9 month birthday with his first biter biscuit:

Riley weighs 20 lbs and is 28” tall.

He’s just days away from crawling, we think. The “underside” leg still gets stuck as he tries to go for something out of reach, but he figures out a way to get there eventually. We catch him up on all fours before he goes back to sitting, so we're hoping he gets courageous before Grammy leaves on Tuesday. Once he does, the chasing will begin.

He’s trying to pull himself to a standing position, still lacks the strength, but he gives it a good effort with certain pieces of furniture or toys. Here he is on his knees, peering over the ottoman:

His favorite game continues to be dropping or throwing toys and seeing where they land. His favorite toy is any plastic duck. He now has four scattered around the house.

He seems to recognize certain words such as eat, milk, food, mama and daddy as he perks up and looks around for said or related object associated with these words. He laughs when we flop his arm up and down and say "bye-bye". Since he also does this motion all on his own for other reasons, I’m not convinced he’s actually waving goodbye intentionally as of yet.

As mentioned in last month’s birthday blog, I’ve not focused on expanding his cuisine, but once we get settled in, he’ll start trying some new things.

For the past 3 weeks, he’s been waking up between 4-5a, so I’ve started putting him to bed an hour later at 8p with limited success. Sometimes, he sleeps in past 5a, and other times he gets up during the 4a hour and then takes an extra long morning nap. We’re hoping this will end by March 9th with moving the clock forward and hour.

Here’s the latest Pooh-bear pics:

As with every other toy, he tried to throw Pooh on the floor:

Poor Pooh; Riley won't sit for a picture with him anymore:

Not finding success, he started crawling over the edge:

Daddy's got a good grip on him, so no bumped noggin this time:

Riley continues to be a source of joy, amusement and delight for his mom and dad. These days seem to fly by as we start the countdown to his first birthday. We'll leave you with a short video of Riley's first episode of self-feeding:



Shelby