Rosa's nine-month letter

Dear Rosa,
Somehow, you went and changed your age again!  You have now been nine months old for a week, so your letter is a little bit overdue.  Here's what you are up to at nine months:

You are now crawling up on your hands and knees instead of army crawling on your belly.  You occasionally slip back into the army crawl, but not too often.  You seem to enjoy trying out your new crawl and find that it gives you a good platform to reach up and grab things. 

You are all about grabbing things.  We have fished more things out of your mouth than we can even count.  We call you our human vacuum cleaner!  You have managed to stuff all sorts of things in there, including a marble that I retrieved today.  With your older brother and sister running around, there are constantly things on the floor, despite our best efforts to pick them all up, and you spend much of your time nabbing stray objects and trying to stuff them into your mouth.  This gives your Mommy and Mama the job of watching you like hawks at all times!  As anyone who has spent any time with you can attest, you are relentless in your pursuit of small objects. 

When you're not on the lookout for the next mouth object, you are usually being carried around by a parent or being affectionately hauled around by your siblings.  You very patiently submit to being held by your older sister and you laugh on cue when your older brother does something funny.  They both adore you and let you know that in their own ways.  It's a good thing you are so mellow!

In terms of sleep, your nighttimes have taken a turn for the better in the last few nights.  Mommy and Mama finally moved you out of our room and into your own room.  This has translated into you sleeping through the night for several nights in a row, which is new for you.  You had been waking up when we went to bed and spending the rest of the night in our bed, nursing sporadically, so this is a big change for the better.  We hope this is just the beginning of a long time of sleeping through the night!

Let's see, what other developmental things have you done?  Well, you have mastered the pincer grasp, as I alluded to earlier.  You can pass things from hand to hand.  And, you recently learned to clap and to wave, although you do both things only sometimes at this point.  You are also this close to pulling yourself up to standing.  You have done it a few times, but it still eludes you for the most part.  You also respond to your name and babble a blue streak.

Finally, I will just say that you have continued your love affair with food into this month.  You will eat pretty much anything we shovel into your mouth.  It's a little bit hard to tell when you are full, because you just love to eat so much.  Your I'm-full cues include biting down on the spoon and gagging, so that's what we watch out for.  It's a lot of fun to feed you and see you enjoying it so much.

We love you all day, every day, to the moon and stars and back again.  We love you just the way you are and we celebrate all the things you're learning how to do.  We can't wait to see what the next month will bring!

love,
Mama and Mommy

PS:  Photos are coming, I promise!