9 months

monkiki is 9 months old! she is 29.5 inches long and weighs 19 lbs. she's standing unassisted, but not taking any steps yet. we're not encouraging her to walk though, because she's already into everything! she's mimicking words, waving, blowing kisses, crawling super fast, and eating just about everything. her favorite food is plain greek yogurt, but she also loves garlic quinoa & brown rice, toast, sweet potato puree, and pizza crust. a few things she has tried and liked and then fed to the dog: broccoli, meatloaf, sweet potato fries, french fries, and blueberries. i made her some teething biscuits with the surplus of baby oatmeal cereal and she loved those, but sebastian loved them more. she has learned that if she holds something out to him, he will take it from her hand and then she watches him eat it and laughs. it might be time to get her a high chair after all.

she continues to love music more and more. anything remotely resembling music makes her dance, and sometimes she even sings and dances and bangs on things just because. i woke up the other morning to her tapping a beat on the mirror and singing "la la la la" all by herself in the pack n play. i think we have a future musician or dancer!

this is our unanimous favorite picture of her from the past month. she is such a silly girl, always making funny faces!

8 months

i can't believe our little kiki cat is 8 months old! she's the sweetest, silliest girl in the world. she's growing like crazy and doing new things every day. she's now pulling up to stand, cruising all day around the outside of the pack n play, and has even gotten confident enough to practice letting go which of course results in immediate falling. i expect she'll be walking relatively soon though, as determined as she is to stand unsupported. she's drinking water out of a sippy cup on her own, letting me feed her purees and greek yogurt from a spoon, and feeding herself non-slimy things like chunks of cheddar cheese and pizza crusts. she says "mama" all the time, usually when she's screaming from another room to get me to come back. in the past few days she has started waving, but mostly just to herself in the mirror. she has full control of the walker and it's beyond cute to watch her run as fast as she can toward colby! it's just a preview of the days when she's older and can run into his arms. i can't wait for that.

she's still obsessed with our laptops, so i got out colby's clunky old toshiba and we let her pull up to the coffee table in her walker and bang on it. she loves it so much she screams at the top of her lungs. other things she loves but should not: cords of any kind, our phones, ipods, CDs, amazon boxes, and dish sponges to name a few. she has a few favorite toys, but would ditch any of them in a heartbeat for the things i just listed.

we finally got her to enjoy the water last week! we've been trying and i think the temperature has been too cold for her liking, but we drove out to hawksnest one afternoon recently and i walked confidently right into the water with her before she even realized what was going on. once she discovered it was just like bath time but with salty water, she was hooked! she started splashing like crazy and squealing, then licking the salt off of her lips. we can't wait to get her back in the water.

7 months

cat scratch fever is 7 months old today! she is doing so many new things i hope i can remember all of them. she can sit up easily and in fact refuses to lie down for diaper changes now. she's still  fitting in some of her 3 month onesies and wearing size 2 diapers, but is in 9 mo. jammies and even fits into a few 12 mo. things, which means pretty soon she'll be dressed in nothing but hello kitty. she's now able to wear her juicy shoes that are for 1 year olds if that tells you how big her feet are.

we finally made some progress with food. a couple weeks ago, i was eating a banana and she was opening her mouth so i let her nibble on it. she went crazy and took a few good bites, chewed, and swallowed. from then on, i started letting her taste what i'm eating if it's not spicy. so far she has gnawed on quite a few bananas, a nectarine, a celery stalk, a couple pizza crusts, and a johnny cake. she has also licked pizza sauce, a sour cream and onion chip, and had a taste of ice cream. she still doesn't like to touch sticky stuff like avocado and banana, but she's comfortable with a pizza crust so maybe she's just prissy. she still refuses all foods from a spoon and i'm starting to worry that it's her lip tie preventing her from using the spoon comfortably. we've tried oatmeal many times, baby food bananas and sweet potatoes, and she pushes it all out with her tongue and gags.

she is such a silly girl and enjoys scratching anything and everything. her favorites are the back of the chair we sit in together and the top of my laptop which makes a sound like a dj scratching a record. she laughs and screams while she does it. colby calls her cat scratch aka kizzy skrizzy. she thinks that knocking on the table is hilarious. she loves to imitate me using my laptop. she rolls up to the coffee table in her walker and aggressively pushes all the keys on the keyboard. yesterday she ripped my F5 button off! she once again likes to hang upside down and now also cracks up when we bounce her and throw her in the air. she is very comfortable playing independently, which is great because i'm now taking her to work with me at a real estate office for 4 hours 2 days a week. she can roll around playing with toys in the pack and play for sometimes 2 hours straight without needing anything more than a wave from me to make sure i'm paying attention to all the cool stuff she's doing.

and now for the biggest news of all... on the 4th she figured out how to crawl AND sprouted 2 razor sharp bottom teeth all in one day!

"it's not that serious"

i find myself thinking this so many times every day, particularly when it comes to discussing parenting with other women. babycenter is an annoying non-stop barrage of neurotic mothers stressing over the tiniest of things. how and when do i transition my baby from this thing to this thing? how many ounces should my baby be eating on this exact schedule every day? how and when and what kind of solids can i feed, and will she choke or die or poop a different color or texture? i need the most expensive, fanciest car seat and high chair or my baby will die, right? if she's in the walker for more than 20 minutes will she get hip dysplasia? my sister in law let my baby lick a popsicle... is she ruined for life? i made a bottle an hour and 15 minutes ago, did it magically turn into poison after exactly one hour?!

just stop. we should of course strive to be the best parents we can be, but how good can we be if we can't trust our instincts and simply enjoy our sweet little babies? feed your baby when she's hungry. give her some baby food or a chunk of whatever you're eating when you feel like it. it's not necessary to stress about the life time effects of not breastfeeding your kid until she's 5 and feeding only organic non-gmo homemade baby food recipes you found on pinterest. all car seats sold in the US have to meet very high minimum standards. high chairs are high chairs. i could go on and on, but i'll just say it's not a competition and it's not that serious.

i have an extremely easygoing baby and maybe i'll eat my words some day when i have another one, but i believe she is so easy and relaxed because we are. i have no idea how many total ounces of formula she eats per day. when i wanted to stop swaddling, i swaddled her with one arm out for a few nights, then no arms for a few nights and then a sleep sack or no swaddle. i didn't ask anyone what to do or freak out every day over how it would go that night. kitten used to take hours to nurse to sleep and only nap on me. it was exhausting, but i kept trying periodically to put her down for naps and eventually she figured it out with no drama or crying it out or sleep training or stress.

this isn't to say that we shouldn't do all the research and make good decisions, but if you find yourself panicking over the latest greatest baby product or something you think you should be doing to be a better mom than the next lady, take a deep breath and relax because it's just not that serious.

when i was 22, i was diagnosed with endometriosis and advised that i would have problems conceiving. i loved my doctor and trusted her opinion when she told me that i would need infertility treatments and that after 30 it would probably be completely impossible for me to get pregnant. around that time there was a tv commercial with a mom changing her baby and kissing his feet. i don't remember what the commercial was for, but i do recall crying and thinking that was all i wanted and i would never be happy until i had that. as my 20s flew by, i started losing hope.

yesterday as i changed cat's diaper, i kissed her little feet and she giggled. i remembered that commercial and smiled. it's more amazing than i ever imagined all those years. she's our perfect little miracle baby and she brings us so much happiness!

6 months

it's kitten cat's half birthday today! she's now rolling both ways and can occasionally sit up from laying flat on her back if she rolls to one side first. she sits up longer and better every day. when she's bored with sitting, she throws herself into a crawling position and inch worms around. the only time she'll attempt a real crawling motion is when she's trying to get to the dog, and she's not very good at it. she has been noticing sebastian more and more every day, and loves to pet him. he's surprisingly tolerant of her occasional fur-grabs, but most of the time she just rubs her hand across his back gently.

cat loves her walker and has figured out how to move it where she wants to go, which is pretty much always either straight for sebastian or the box fan in the living room. that thing hurts when she runs over your feet! she isn't doing as much talking with the consonant sounds lately, but she's laughing up a storm. she loves the words "stupid" and "stop" and laughs hysterically when we say them. she also cracks up when i knock or tap on things, especially the mirror.

we tried oatmeal cereal once and avocado a few times and so far have had zero success with solid food. she threw up all her formula one day, so in a desperate attempt to keep some food down, we offered cereal. she hated it and also threw that up. a few weeks later we gave her a slice of avocado and she ignored it. i tried showing her how to eat it and handing it back to her, but she wasn't interested whatsoever. i mashed some up on a spoon and tried to feed it to her, but she made a face and spit it right back out. every time we've tried since then, she has been uninterested and then sebastian stole it!

we are officially cloth diapering and only using 1 or 2 disposables a day because right now i only have 4 pocket diapers. i'm probably going to order about 6 more and get some bamboo inserts and we'll be 100%. i've been putting a disposable on her in the afternoon before she poops because i'm afraid of washing poo diapers, but she got me today so we'll see how that goes when i do the laundry tomorrow.

5 months

i'm super late getting this posted, but chatty catty is 5 months old. we got her measured a little bit late, but she was almost 15 lbs and 26 inches, which means she grew 2 inches in one month! she went from 25-50th percentile to 75th in a matter of weeks. she can sit up from a slight incline and stay sitting up straight for a long time. she sometimes throws herself forward and gets into a crawling position, but then she gets cranky and rolls onto her back. she has yet to roll back to her belly, but it seems like she just isn't interested in doing that because she hates tummy time. she's still an excellent sleeper, going for 10-12 hours straight at night and then taking 2 very long naps every day. she's always been a good night sleeper but a terrible napper, however over the past month she has been learning how to soothe herself to sleep and that means she doesn't have to sleep attached to me anymore. i miss it, but i can actually get things done now so it's for the best. i noticed that she was waking up in the morning, sucking on her fingers and going back to sleep without any crying, so i tried putting her down for naps as soon as she starts rubbing her eyes, and it worked perfectly! she stares at the striped curtain in the bedroom, sucks on those fingers, talks to herself a little, and falls asleep in 5 minutes. she's amazing.

we finally threw in the towel on breastfeeding after she became too distracted to stay latched and i'm not able to pump enough to make it worthwhile to continue. we fought hard for those 5 months and i can say i did everything i could for her. we're waiting until at least 6 months to start solid foods, at which point we will skip purees and start giving her steamed veggies that are soft enough for her to explore without risk of choking. my mom got kitten a walker that has a removable toy bar, so we plan on using the walker with the plain tray instead of also having a high chair. i can already picture sebastian following the walker around the house, cleaning up the trail of food she leaves behind her.

in addition to sitting up, she's getting good at using her hands. she can grab the giraffes on her walker, pull them down, stand up, and put them in her mouth with near-perfect accuracy. she also loves to stick her hands inside my mouth, or grab my hands or lips and aggressively shove them into her mouth while growling. she babbles constantly and makes all kinds of consonant sounds (la, ga, da, ma) and when her hand is in her mouth she says something that sounds a whole lot like "i love you," so i always say "i love you too, baby girl!" i know she's not really saying that, but maybe it will turn into that... you never know!