Three-Quarters of the Way to One

Allison turned nine months last Saturday. We celebrated by leaving warm, sunny Virginia Beach and our hotel on the ocean and putting her in her car seat for a tortuous 8.5 hours. However when we got to our hotel, we were lucky enough to be put in a big room where she had plenty of space to roll around AND CRAWL. That is right, Allison had her first official, true, "hands and knees off the ground" crawl. She had been getting so close. She was good at rolling, turning, dragging, and pulling herself around the house. She just could never get the hang of picking up both knees off the ground. We had a feeling that she would master the skill before the end of our vacation and she did not disappoint us.

She is also trying to pull herself up on the couch (or anything else she can find.) She can get from a laying to a sitting position. It always throws me off when I see her rolling around the floor and five seconds later she is sitting there.

We are trying more table food. We tried Mac-N-Cheese today, or at least a form of it. It was more of an Alfredo sauce rather than the powder cheese. She loves sliced cheese and her puffs. At one point in time on the way home from vacation, I was so desperate to keep her happy that I let her hold on to her puffs' container. She looked like a couch potato eating chips from a bag, the way she was digging into that container. Luckily we found out that a serving size of the puffs are 65-80 pieces and even then it is only 25 calories. We don't feel so bad that she eats so many.

She also has been a teething machine. She is cutting her fifth tooth. It has basically been a tooth a week. She was really fussy on Monday night which I thought was due to the fourth tooth coming through, however I saw yet another tooth making its way through.

Allison loves taking walks with Dad in her Baby Bjorn (front carrier.) For some reason we were bad about using it and left it in the closet. For the trip we decided to use it so we could take walks along the beach, so we did a test run to the ice cream shop the night before we left. She loved it. She thinks it is funny when Brian is walking behind me and they "catch me." I act like I am running and Brian runs after me and Allison tags me. She cracks up laughing. I just wished we pulled this out of the closet a lot sooner (e.g. before she weighed 20 pounds.)

Speaking of weight, not sure on the exact amount, but I'm guessing close to 20 pounds. She has her nine month appointment next week. Luckily no shots.

Sleeping through the night has been hit or miss lately. We finally cut her "dream feed" bottle out while we were on vacation. I was waking her up at 10 pm, to give her one last bottle, however by this age she should be able to go from 7 pm until the morning without a bottle. She did well on vacation without it. She woke up a few times, but her pack-n-play was close enough to our bed that I could roll over and rub her back until she fell back to sleep. This week, I haven't been so lucky as I have had to give a bottle in the middle of the night or very early in the morning. I am chalking it up to her teething and coming back from vacation. Hopefully we will get back to normal in the next couple of days.