Nine Months or 40 weeks

Little Buddy turned nine months old on December 5th and 40 weeks old yesterday. I can't believe our little man has been out longer than he was in! Life with him is such a joy that it's hard to find the words so, for now, I'll just stick to facts:

• Length: 29.5", 81%
• Weight: 18.5lbs, 19%

 Our long and lean boy! He was 36% for weight at his last check up but started crawling a little over two weeks ago, causing him to slim down even further. When we had our last check, we were given instructions to start him on solids with a lot of fat along with continuing to breastfeed. The plan was to do baby led weaning, giving him "real" table food rather than purees. Little Buddy wasn't very interested in that and would gag a lot when trying to eat. We switched to purees last week and it's been going much better! I'm melting down coconut oil into some of his purees to try to beef him up a bit. My mom was able to reassure me, though, that I was long and lean, too, so no reason to be overly concerned.

He did start crawling about 2.5 weeks ago and immediately went into standing/couch walking the next day. Eek! We now have a SUPER mobile baby and a great many baby gates around our house. Most of our pictures are blurry these days as we attempt to capture a smile before he crawls away!

We tried sleep training and, after three+ weeks, only got him to sleep 1 hour in the pack n play before needing to come back into our bed (and even that was with anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes of crying). I looked up how to sidecar his crib and we did that this week. So far it's going better with me nursing him to sleep in bed and then just shifting him over to the crib tethered to my side of the bed. It's still just an hour or so of sleep but there's no crying and we have a lot more space for the grownups to sleep.

Little Buddy has learned to crawl over to us and demand attention by pulling pants legs or lifting his arms to be picked up. We are trying to ask him if he wants "up" before picking him up to teach him an action word. He has been babbling "da-da-da-da-da" and "ba-ba-ba-ba-ba" for a couple months already, adding "muh-muh-muh" and "nuh-nuh-nuh" recently.

He still hates the bottle, ugh. We tried introducing a sippy cup which he likes to chew but not suck on. He does like drinking water from a cup while in the bath, though, so we'll see how that goes.

Little Buddy still cries when he's without mom or dad. I had to drop out of BSF since he wasn't tolerating the nursery and something similar happened with my small group, too. Little K has started spending time in the church nursery with her brother while I'm on stage singing, which has helped a bit but is still a delicate balance of will he/won't he cry. *sigh*

He loves the Christmas tree and Christmas lights outside. He cried when he met Santa. He dances when he hears music, especially in rehearsal with me. He naps best in the Ergo. He has four teeth with 4 more coming in. He whines when he's tired but talks and laughs a ton. He's completely perfect.

I am so thankful for this boy every single day.