9 Months Old!

Braden is nine months old, and he continues to grow so fast! He is all over the place and into everything.

His new stats:

• Weight: 17 pounds 10 ounces (10th percentile)
• Height: 28.5 inches (58th percentile)
• Head circumference: 44.5cm (26th percentile)

Here are his new discoveries:

• The curtains - he LOVES to play in them. He hides behind them and then pops out and laughs hysterically.
• Henry - up until recently he has only paid attention to our dog, Rocco. He has now discovered one of our cats, Henry. He thinks Henry is SO funny. Henry also enjoys playing with Braden's toys in the basement, so Braden thinks Henry is playing with him.
• Door stoppers - he found these awhile ago, but I'm not sure I ever posted about it. He loves flicking the door stoppers. He actually pulled one out of the wall the other day, but it turns out that they just screw right back in. Who knew?
• Socks - he pull his socks off now and just puts them in his mouth. Yuck. Luckily it's warming, so socks will be worn must less frequently.
• Drawers - he has figured out that to open drawers, all you have to do is pull. Ugh.

His new accomplishments include:

• Constant babbling... he started with "baba" and then quickly learned "gaga", "dada", and "mama". His newest is "yaya". He isn't saying "dada" or "mama" in reference to either of us yet, so we don't consider any of those his first words.
• First tooth: he got his first tooth this past month. It's so cute!
• Climbing stairs: Oh yes, he just crawls right up them. We didn't even teach him that. One day he was just crawling and got up to the stairs, so of course we were right behind him, and then he just proceeded to crawl all the way up the stairs.
• The fist bump: This might be my favorite thing so far. He hold his fist out for you to bump! He will also try to fist bump himself in the mirror :)

Eating patters:

• He has finally outgrown the milk intolerance! Hooray for him, and double hooray for our bank account! He is now on Enfamil Gentlease. I can buy two 22 ounce containers for the price of one 19.5 ounce container of the old stuff. And, I can often find it on clearance because stores have an excess supply. Score!
• He drinks 18-24 ounces of formula each day. Once when he gets up each morning, one before each nap, and one before bed.
• We are slowly moving on to finger foods. Of course, he loves puffs. He also likes these rice wafer things call Baby Mum-Mum (strange name, I know). Gerber also makes these things that look like Cheetos... he likes those too, but makes a GIGANTIC mess when he eats them. Holy moly. We try to feed him a bit of what we eat, but he's not too sure about everything yet. Though he had made it perfectly clear that he would eat pancakes for every meal if we let him. Pancakes and cream of wheat, strawberries and cream flavor. Not plain flavor - he spit that right back out!
• He still has baby food three times a day because he doesn't eat enough finger food to fill him up. His new favorites are: (1) strawberry, apple, banana combo and (2) squash mixed with applesauce and a bit of cinnamon. Don't ask how we figured that out... but cinnamon is good for you!

Sleeping Patterns:

• He is FINALLY sleeping through the night! YAY!!!!
• Daylight savings time is our new best friend. Instead of going to bed at 6:30pm, he is now going down between 7:30 and 8:00 and then wakes up around 6:30am. Sometimes he has his bottle and then goes back to sleep for another hour or so. Sometimes he doesn't!
• He is finally on a nap schedule - two naps a day! One around 11am and one around 2 or 3pm. We usually get one long nap and one shorter nap for a total of 3 to 3.5 hours a day.
• He sleeps on his stomach and then ends up sleeping on his knees because he pulls his legs up underneath him.
• We have to put like four pacifiers in his crib with him because he ends of throwing most of them out of the crib at some point. We go in to get him in the morning and there are pacifiers all over the floor!

We are loving every minute with him! We are so glad that the weather is getting warmer because he loves to be outside. He loves walks and just playing with his toys outside. We ate dinner outside one night this week and he thought that was the greatest thing ever. For awhile, we were getting frustrated because we wanted to be able to go out to eat, but going to dinner with Braden just was not working out very well. He was just cranky because it was getting near bedtime. One day we went out to lunch instead - Best. Idea. Ever. He is perfect around lunch time if we put him in the highchair and give him puffs or something. We are very happy that we are able to go out to eat again! Though I feel bad for the people that have to clean up our mess when we leave... puffs end up everywhere.