Addison- 9 months

Last Monday we had Addison's 9 month appointment. She weighed 17 lbs 13 oz and was 28 1/2 inches long. She has dropped in to about the 34th percentile for weight from about the 50th, and the doctor seemed a little concerned, but I'm not. Raegan followed the same curve and she is just a skinny little mini. That's all there is to it. I'm not sure why doctors act like dropping in the percentiles is cause for concern. I mean, in the past 3 months she has gone from being pretty much sedentary to mobile. Obviously she is going to start slimming up. Everything else went well at her appointment.

She started crawling this past Saturday. She has been scooching around pretty well for a while now, and now she finally has mastered the crawling. She still seems to like to scooch a lot, though. I also started her on finger foods. Since I made my own baby food, I didn't bring my frozen cubes with me from Arizona. And instead of going through all that work of making tons of batches of pureed food, I decided to try and start incoporating pieces of food in to her diet, and just bought a few Gerber meals for the time being. As soon as she started eating the finger foods, she was totally over the pureed. The only problem is, she still hasn't shown interest in putting them in her mouth herself. That really stinks because she loves food, so I have to sit there and feed her the pieces one by one. It takes forever with as much as she eats. At least she is a good eater, though, and I know she will eventually get in to feeding herself. She just hasn't ever been a baby that really sticks things in her mouth. Good in most instances I guess.

Other things going on with her this month...
-She still will not take a bottle or pacifier...and never has. She did drink water from a sippy cup the other day, but my mom was holding it for her. She also probably got a bunch of it down her shirt instead of actually in her mouth.
-Having horrible issues sleeping. She was such a good sleeper as a newborn, and now she is having such a rough time sleeping. She wakes up multiple times a night, and sometimes has a hard time going back to sleep. I'm so exhausted all of the time. I'm sure it has something to do with me nursing her to sleep, but I honestly try and keep her awake and she still falls asleep nursing. Even on the nights I put her in bed awake, she still wakes up needing me.
-Extreme stranger anxiety. Since I have never really left her in a daycare setting, now that I want to put her in a gym daycare or church nursery, she screams and screams. I hoping with repitition and short intervals of being without me, we can work through this. I'm pretty sure she will never quite be the baby that just takes off and never looks back, like Raegan.
-Loves clapping. I love to say "Yay!' to her. She gets so happy and just claps so much.
-Still only says "mama" and "dada", but she is starting to form more syllables.
-Still only has her bottome 2 teeth, which I find kind of strange because she was an early teether with the first two. She has been gnawing on her fingers like crazy, though, so I'm sure it won't be much longer before we see some top ones coming through.

I just love her to pieces. Even with all of the sleepless nights, she just lights up my day. What a blessing she is to us.