Happy 9 Month Adjusted Birthday, Hallie!

I can't believe our little muffin is 9 months old adjusted. She's having a lovely time exploring the physical universe around her. She loves nothing more than cruising around the furniture, climbing in and out of her ball pit/playhut, and figuring out how to scale the furniture, her mommies, and the wall (I am not joking about the last one, either: the other morning, she was climbing up her shadow on the wall above the futon and throwing herself backwards to land on her back on the futon. She thought it was hilarious).

She also enjoys making a mad dash for it down the hall whenever we leave her bedroom door open. It's funny because she knows that we are right behind her so she speeds up her crawl. Happily, even in our dotage we're still a bit faster than her little legs are and manage to scoop her up and put her back where she started so that she can begin the process all over again.

Hallie has been having fun outside in the back play yard as long as we're all around and paying some attention to her (this is critical---she is very social and while she plays with toys happily she wants to know that we're at least watching her to see what she can do. If she doesn't have enough attention, she'll act out a bit---she might find some cords and wires or shoes she should not be playing with and go for them. A little scary).

Anyway, her eating is getting a bit better---as long as the texture is neither too thin nor too thick and has a nice apple saucy puree like quality to it, she seems fine. Her favorite foods are strongly flavored and a bit eccentric: a great meal consists of avocado (preferably guacamole from Whole Foods---mine is a bit too chunky), perhaps mixed with some chicken stock, and ricotta cheese. We also tried my new cheesy peas recipe--melt some spreadable cheddar in the microwave, add baby peas, chicken stock, and if you want, another veggie. Cool and serve. Very yummy. She can now take about 10-15 spoonfulls (gerber spoon size, not adult) of a food that she likes and, as long as she doesn't choke on something, she's been keeping it all down. Hallie does exhibit some ultimately good, but as of now, a bit counterproductive, toddler behaviors, like wanting to feed herself. This sometimes lands the food in her, but more often on her. She is also experimenting with her pincer grasp---she would love nothing more than a big pile of cheerios or Trader Joe's veggie stix to do this with, but this, alas, would be disastrous (as in, it would promote the refund of all that yummy avocado mush). So we give her broken up, tiny pieces of cheerios or gerber finger foods and she happily shoves them in her mouth, under her onesie, in the crevices of her high chair, and sticks them on her forehead. Quite the look.

Finally, Hallie has been 'talking' a bit more to us. Still no consonants, but definitely more noise. You will notice that Hallie's voice sounds a bit like a cross between Stevie Nick's post vocal cord polyps and Lauren Bacall's after twenty seven years of smoking:



(I'll try to add some pics later!)