Aveline turned nine months old last Saturday. I have favorite aspects of every stage of babyhood, but I do believe we have entered my favorite stage of all. I feel like with these nine months comes a burst of personality. I am really seeing glimpses of Avie in all her Avie-ness. Sure, I have always had certain instincts relating to who this little one really is and the particular demeanor that envelops her being, but she is really starting to do things now. And it is pretty exciting.
Avie's smiles and laughter continue to be contagious. She is the sunshine to my every morning. Today she, I do believe, made the day of four women at the doctor's office. And that is not including the two passersby, who were waving and smiling profusely at her as I held her at the waiting room window, describing the scenery to her as we painstakingly waited for our turn. More often than not, she truly does embody the word "happy."
Avie still topples backward sometimes while sitting, especially if she is excited and really into a toy and brings it to her mouth with a little too much gusto. But, overall, she is sitting fairly steady. And she reaches really far forward and is doing some rocking back and forth, but still no crawling. She nearly always wakes up now on her tummy, and so seems to have a preference to sleeping in that position now.
She is still eating quite a lot, her favorite being an Ella's Kitchen beef medley. The girl starts going crazy when she sees one of the food pouches. And now even if she sees berries -- or really any food -- because her choking reflex has seemed to have let up a little in this past week, and I have been giving her more (tiny) pieces of things, which she just adores. She has really gotten the hang of picking up and eating the baby puffs just in the last couple of days. Avie has six teeth now, two on the bottom and four on the top. The top four seemed to come in all at once, and the girl still pretty much took it in stride. She was a little more fussy, but not too bad. I do think it was the cause of leading her to start waking twice during the night again. We will see if we can get back down to one waking soon.
She still loves baths, just like her big sister. I think the two of them could live in the bathtub. And we went across the street to the pool last Friday for the first time this summer, and she thoroughly enjoyed sitting in the shallow end, splashing around there too.
Probably most exciting to me, Avie is starting to latch on to sign language. She has "more" down, for sure. She had started doing it here and there over the last two or three weeks, but it was when she, Elsa, and I were blowing bubbles outside last week that she really started using the sign -- over and over again. She has also clearly signed for "dog," "light," and "milk," and has attempted "fan." She also seems to do something for "all done," but it is more just putting her arms straight out to her sides, with a slight shaking of her hands -- she does not totally have the twisting of the wrists down. We are learning more: "book," "play," "change diaper," and various animal signs, etc. She seems very interested in whatever sign I am showing her at the time.
She loves books when I actually find the time to read them to her, poor child. I think I read awhile back in my old blog posts that Elsa was actually pointing to books, letting us know which one she wanted us to read to her at this point. She used to have all of her books just in one huge pile in her room, mostly because we did not have a bookshelf at the time. I used to just sit her there and let her flip through page after page. Perhaps that is the better way to do it. But I think Elsa just had more of a natural affinity for books. Avie would rather slap the pages or chomp on them most of the time. She does seem to really enjoy Goodnight Moon, though, much to my delight. She also likes me to sing to her, and when I am doing so while nursing her and putting her down for the night, she likes to put her finger in my mouth (which complicates the singing, but is cute).
At her doctor's appointment on Monday, she weighed 18 pounds, 4 ounces (50th percentile), was 29.5 inches long (95th percentile), and had a head circumference of 17.75 inches. So she dropped a bit on the charts for weight (but this is fairly normal at this age because of more movement, less breastfeeding and more solids, etc.), but went up the charts for height. They were out of one of the vaccines that day, so we had to go back today to get her shots -- the Hib and the pneumococcal conjugate vaccines. So she did not cry last time she got a shot, but she certainly did this time. It probably did not help that there were two pricks, but she cried a little even with the first one. But she was easily consoled and all was well.
Boy, I love our girls. They suck the life out of me on a daily basis, but could anything be more worth the tiredness, the aches, the pains? Our life's cup is overflowing, and we are so thankful for every last drop.
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