9 Months Old!

This month has just flown by!  Ellie will be 9 months old as of 7:47 this evening.

(modeling her beautiful Ghanian dress from Miss Sarah!)

Actually, today she is exactly 39 weeks old.  Which means that she's been in my arms longer than she was in my stomach (which was 38 weeks and 1 day).  I can't believe it.  Yesterday I was out shopping and saw a three week old baby and thought he looked SO SMALL, but really he wasn't any tinier than she was at that age, she's just gotten so big over the past 9 months.  We go in on the 15th for her 9 month check-up and shots, so we'll see then how big she actually is.

  

Over the past month, she's gotten much more mobile.  She's not walking yet, but she's so so close.  She pulls up to standing on anything that will provide enough resistance and walks along the side of anything she can.  She will even transition from object to object in order to keep walking.  And she no longer falls down when she's done standing, she does a very controlled sit.  She is into everything.  Even the stuff that we've tried to keep out of her reach she finds some way to get to.  

(this is our VOIP phone system that Ellie loves to play with.  If you leave us a message and we don't call back, she deleted it.)

It's ridiculous.  And constant.  I can't even brush my teeth without having to chase her away from something or pull something out of her mouth.  At least she's started to enjoy the pacifier now so that's a good way to stop her from chewing on everything.  

Speaking of chewing on things ... she still has a total of zero teeth.  She goes through phases where she works on the one that you can see RIGHT THERE under the gum, but it hasn't broken through yet.  This is about 4 months that she's been working on it.  4 months for one stinkin' tooth.  Crazy.  I'm almost expecting it to pop through as an adult tooth with all the drama that it's causing!

She is really into eating, too.  Like, REALLY into eating.  She loves food.  Of all kinds.  We haven't tried something yet that she didn't like.  And this month we tried vegetables!  Peas and carrots, so far.  I basically get one new food for her each time I go grocery shopping, which is every other week.  Today she had some more applesauce that she actually liked.  I found (at Aldi!) cups of no-sugar-added applesauce.  The ingredients are just apples and water, just like homemade, but I don't have to actually peel and core and cook and mash the apples myself.  Fantastic.  So anyway, they're 4 ounces each and she ate the ENTIRE THING this afternoon!  We couldn't believe it.

Ellie had some pretty exciting times this past month, though.  For the first time, she was a guest at a birthday party!  Her second-cousin Luci turned one in September and we got to go over to celebrate.  She had a blast playing with all of Luci's toys and seeing everyone.  She wasn't too thrilled about the party hat, though...

She did enjoy sitting in the grass and having some deep conversations with the birthday girl...

And their neighbors to the back have quite a few animals, so Grampy took her back to meet the turkeys...

It was a really fun, cute party and it got me thinking that I need to get started planning Ellie's!  There's only 3 months left and there is a LOT going on in there, so I really better get to work now.  I have an idea that I'm pretty set on, but her Daddy isn't so sure it's 'appropriate' for a one-year-old.  Humph.  We'll see who gets their way. 

Speaking of  Daddy, we also celebrated HIS birthday this month!  

He turned 28 just a few days ago.  Ellie also made him a super cute card with her hand prints on it.  Yeah, that was a fun project.  I'm just glad that I had my craft table set up to work on it!  SO much easier than trying to lay everything out on the floor!

Here's a few more fun pictures from our 'monthday' photo shoot this morning.  I let her run around her room while I picked out her clothes and got everything set up and this is the mayhem that ensued:  First, she wanted to pull books off the bookshelf and look at the pictures...

Super cute, but still a mess to clean up.  Then, she wanted to do this...

... pull the socks out of the basket, un-pair them, and throw them all over the floor.  Don't you just love that smirk?  How come she's so cute when she's being naughty??  I had to put the camera down and put a stop to the 'fun' when she started going after the diaper pail.  Sorry deary, you cannot unpack that one.

Anyway, we have a lot of fun stuff coming up this month.  Our church camp's Fall Festival is happening in a few weeks and we're heading off to that.  It will be Ellie's first time at the camp where her Mommy and Daddy met, fell in love, and got married.  It's a pretty special place to our family, so I'm really excited to take her there.  

We'll also celebrate Ellie's first Halloween!  Halloween is one holiday that was never huge in my family.  We were allowed to dress up and go trick-or-treating, but our costumes had to be 'nice' - nothing scary or spooky - and we didn't decorate.  I mean, we decorated for FALL, but not Halloween specifically.  It was a nice compromise, I think.  So Ellie's going to dress up and we're heading to a local state park for their Halloween in the Park event.  Basically, they open up the camping area and the campers decorate their campsites and families can come in and go trick-or-treating there.  No cars or streets or questionable houses to worry about.  Plus, it's designed for families, so I won't feel as weird about taking a baby.  There's also hay rides and food and a pet parade for pets that dress up and all sorts of other fun stuff.  I think it'll be a good first-Halloween experience for us.  We got her costume (as a hand-me-down) this week, so now I'm extra excited to see just how much cuter she can possibly get!