Merritt: 9 months

Oh, hello adorable baby who hit 9 months last week

Obligatory comparison 9 month shot

Cuties

I must confess, I didn’t take many notes about this month. I think it must have been the move or something… 🙂 Let’s get to it though.

The morning I took these photos Zoe was playing with stickers. I was going to take them off Merritt’s face. But then, I didn’t. Obviously it’s a representation of being a second kid. The funny part was that Merritt had no reaction when Zoe was putting them on her. She just kept going about her business. I love those girls.

The biggest development this month is her rapid CRAWLING. So fast. She went from thinking about it, scooting around, getting from here and there at her leisure to busting her ass to get from place to place. She’s a speedy little machine.

The funniest thing is the way she crawls. Usually it’s on all fours like most kiddos. But it seems like she might not like it so much, so she’ll modify things in one of two ways. 1) she’ll outstretch one leg (always the left) so it’s straight out, and she’ll sort of half slide/crawl along on her left foot and her right shin. It’s pretty hilarious. And 2) she just gets right up on her feet in a downward facing dog position and “crawls” like that – on her hands and feet. My grandma said my dad did the same thing when he was little.

When she’s not quite sure where I am she’ll crawl around grunting. She’ll move from room to room, grunt to see if we call back to her. If we don’t, she moves on looking for us. It’s pretty smart, and always makes me giggle.

One of her FAVORITE things is when Zoe gets on the ground and crawls with her. Obviously Zoe is much faster, so she’s usually far ahead of her, and Merritt just thinks that is HILARIOUS. She cracks up about it. I love hearing that baby giggle.

Merritt and Zoe have gotten good at “playing together.” Obviously they can’t really play together too much yet, but a couple days ago they were in Merritt’s room together and Chris and I were downstairs talking about a project and I could hear Zoe reading to her, them giggling, etc for about 15 minutes.

The bummer about this month for Merritt was the move. Ooh god did she have a tough time. I was all prepared for Zoe, but didn’t think AT ALL that Merritt would have such a hard time. She was over her stranger danger, but she had so much separation anxiety about the new surroundings that she would just start crying as soon as I left the room sometimes 🙁

And the sleep, ooh god the sleep. As I mentioned before, naps were particularly awful. SCREAMING crying for sometimes up to an hour. I think it was the perfect storm of the move + getting a cold + learning a new skill (standing ALL THE TIME) and it just resulted in super crankies 🙁 I was both INCREDIBLY frustrated because I was getting NOTHING done, but I also felt so incredibly bad for her. It was maddening. The good news is (fingers crossed) the last couple of days she seems to have figured the naps out a little better, so that’s really good.

Towards the end of 9 months she started pulling herself to standing. She didn’t really get that she should pull herself up onto something. She would get herself in that downward facing dog position and then sort of try to yank herself up to standing from that position. She didn’t seem to get how difficult that was. But she finally would crawl to the end of something or someone and pull herself to standing. Funny kid.

Food: THE BEST. I thought Zoe could eat. But jesus christ this fucking kid can put it away. I’ll nurse her, she’ll eat a pouch of food, then another one, then a small tupperware of blueberries or strawberries, and then she might grunt for more and more food. On the weekends when I make pancakes I’ve gotten to the point where I make a whole one just for her. Sometimes she’ll eat more than Zoe. It’s crazy. She’s growing a lot, moving around a lot – she’s gotta fuel up! It’s so funny though because if you’re eating something she will STARE you down and just start grunting, “GIVE ME SOME.” She LOVES when we eat my lunch salad together. I put black beans, corn, shredded cabbage, shredded carrots, sunflower seeds, raisins and hardboiled egg in it. She loves to eat all the additions in the salad. She just stands against me while I eat waiting to get her forkfulls between my forkfulls. It’s rather adorable.

Her stats?

Height: 29.75″ (97%)

Weight: 17 lbs 0.7 oz (35%)

She’s been in her curve of 90-100% of height and 30-40% for weight consistently (accidentally wrote 90% for weight last time as I was on autopilot from Zoe, lol). I was a little nervous that she only gained 2 pounds in 3 months (TYPICALLY they gain 1 pound a month), but she’s still right in her curve and takes (literall) 5 craps a day, so the doctor said she just had a really fast metabolism. She’s my little lean machine. I thought it was hard to keep pants on Zoe because she was so skinny, but Merritt can absolutely not wear anything but leggings because she’s so tall, but so lean. Anything that doesn’t have a 100% elastic waist just completely falls off of her. And all her onesies and shirts look so big on her because tehy fit her length wise, but she just swims in them as far as the width. I still just think it’s so funny to have these tall girls. I’ve always had to roll my pant legs because I’m on the shorter/average height scale with really short legs, so things were always way too long on me. Nature is a funny thing.

Welp, that’s the 9 month mark. I’m wondering if she’ll be taking some steps on her own by the 10 month mark. We shall see! 🙂

Comments