Happy Nine-Month Birthday Penelope!

Today Penny turned nine months old! I can hardly believe it. The time does fly. I don't really keep track of things in weeks anymore, but I get this "this week in your baby's development" email and according to that she's 39 weeks old this week. She was born when I was 39 weeks pregnant, so she has now been out of the womb at least as long as she was in. Pretty wild.

In terms of development, she has really perfected her crawling and can now move quickly from point A to point B with a purpose. There have been a lot of cognitive changes too. I can tell she understands a lot of what we are saying to her even if she can't talk yet herself. She definitely understands the word "no" and will cry because she doesn't like it. :) Tonight, I told her we had to say "night-night" to Mr. Bear (her stuffed bear) and she grabbed him up. I hadn't really expected her to understand me, but she at least understood his name which surprised me. The last few days she has also started coming to sit in my lap and did so twice this morning. Let's see, what else? She will pull up on our pants legs now to indicate she wants to be picked up, and will (most of the time) crawl to us if we ask her to "come here". She has been in one of her quiet phases the last couple weeks, but babbled some again today. She really takes the talking stuff in starts and stops. There will be a few days of babbling followed by a week or two of not. I think maybe she's concentrating on other things when she does that. In terms of eating, she has started taking to finger foods much better. She can now do cheerios and "fruit fingers" (slices of mango or pear). Also, tonight she did the funniest thing. I laid her down in her crib and she almost immediately rolled over and sat up, but she was so tired that she just sat there for a second and wobbled and then immediately fell forward back onto the mattress sound asleep. Too funny!

For some reason, the nine-month mark really stands out to me as a milestone moreso than any other month so far. I think it is my math background - half of the second half of a year is now gone. Which is to say, in my mind, "Wow, a whole year has almost gone by."