The Christmas Wonder Week turned into a ridiculous wonder month!
By the weekend after New Years, Sonia was already crawling on hands and knees and pulling herself up to standing. Our Sonia is now truly mobile, and she LOVES to practice! She often squirms out of our arms to be set down, then immediately crawls to the nearest piece of furniture to stand up. Once she’s there, she often looks back at us with a triumphant grin and starts banging her hands and laughing. It’s adorable! Thankfully, toward the end of the month, she’d gotten pretty good at getting herself down safely as well 🙂
Sonia also cut her 3rd tooth this month, surprisingly without much fuss at all. Not sure if the teeth are helping her eat, but she does now have a number of more “adventurous” foods under her belt, such as toast, pasta, egg yolks, salmon and yogurt. She still can’t get enough fruit,though, especially grapes and bananas. We’re not willing to try it, but she makes it seem like if we put a whole bag of grapes in front of her (quartered of course) she’d eat them all!
We can tell Sonia is starting to work more on her language skills as well. She added ‘b’ to her repertoire of ‘m’, ‘n’, and ‘d’, and every once in awhile she gets the right syllables in the right place. Perhaps it’s just by chance for now, but I swear she does ‘mmm’ for more, ‘mama’, ‘dada’, and ‘nna’ (Luna) and even ‘nana’ for banana. One day when I was leaving for work, she even did an amazingly clear ‘bye bye’ out of nowhere. That made my day!
As part of his Christmas gift from Sonia, Eric started taking her to sign language classes. He seems to be a natural at it – jury’s still out on whether Sonia is interested or not.
In addition to the language skills, Sonia’s been working on fine motor skills and mimicking. One of her favorites is the ‘finger lip trill. It’s quite precious, that is until you get sick of her batting at your mouth all the time. 🙂
In the 3rd week of her 9th month, Sonia hit the expected growth spurt, complete with sleep disturbances (i.e. waking up in the middle of the night screaming, pulling herself up to standing, and then wanting to play), and an increased appetite. Finally, toward the end of the month, she came out of it as quickly as she went in and started ‘sleeping it off’ with 2 x 2hr naps during the day and going back to sleeping 11 hrs at night. We didn’t have a doctor’s visit this month, although we did take her in to get her booster flu shot, but I measured her at home at 17lb 9 oz (40%), 27 3/4″ (60%) and 44cm head circumference (50%). That means she grew 1.5″ and put on half a pound in the last month. Crazy!
