9 Months

Last week we celebrated Dave's dad's 70th birthday. You would never know he is 70! Annalise is a big fan of him and was also a particular fan of his chocolate almond-roca birthday cake. (Her first taste of chocolate came a little young. Oopsie.) Happy birthday Parker!

Some birthday party activities included peek-a-boo.

A certain small girl was an enormous fan.

Open-mouth kissie:

On Sunday Annalise became nine months old. She is so big. She is very good at pulling herself up. She is less good at staying up. There have been several major head bonks due to this. And as an unfortunate side-effect of much newfound mobility, she's always generally a little beat up.

She has turned a corner in terms of how she feels about strangers and folks that are not Mommy and Daddy- she loves them, every one. She is constantly begging for errant folks to hold her. At church on Sunday she insisted that the couple next to me hold her once we got there, and when she was done with them, scooted up behind the pew of a young lad and his parents. She put her arm up in the air to indicate her desire to be plucked from the ground but the dad just waved and smiled at her quietly. When that didn't work, she very unquietly grunted at the top of her voice and looked at him expectantly. After she figured out that something was clearly wrong with his ability to understand, she scooted back over to me so I could hold her while she laughed and grunted for a half hour at the teenage boy behind us. Next she spotted her little friend Anna down the row. She flung herself from my arms to the floor and hefted herself on over to say hello and try to squeeze Anna's face. (I have to be very careful with her propensity for face-squeezing- she's been known to unintentionally wound.) So I crept over to help fend her grab-happy fingers off Anna's face and took her back to our seat. That decision was met with an immediate explosionary (and top-of-her-lungs) meltdown so we had to quickly return and then she was happy.

At her nine-month check-up she was found to still have a 90th-percentil noggin, but the rest of the growth has slowed down. She is 18 pounds 12 ounces (50th percentile) and 28 inches tall (60th percentile). I've been so used to impressing people with her size but now she's a shrimp! And after we got home from the doctor she crawled for real! She has done it about twice before, but only a few steps, but yesterday she crawled all the way over to me, with nary a belly-brush on the floor. What a big sweetie girl!