Nine months!

Once again, I am bringing a very different baby back with me from California.  In the last two weeks, she has exploded with skills, speech, and signing.  Thanks to her Uncle Christopher, she has perfected the use of saying “uh oh!” after throwing things on the ground.  I thought that a word we used all the time would be her first (“mama,” anyone???), but no - she hears “uh oh” once and now says it 5000 times a day - and very clearly enunciated, there’s no question what she’s saying.  Here's an early video from the first day she learned it - definitely done without prompting now, and much clearer as a true "uh oh."

She made her first sign this month, too.  Again, was it a simple sign that I’ve used every day for the past 7 months (“bath,” anyone???)?  No, it was “cheese,” a complicated sign that she’s only seen about 10 times total, because we didn’t feed her all that much cheese due to high salt content, and never really fed it to her by itself, only mixed in with other dishes.  Since she now asks for it ALL THE TIME, though, her cheese consumption has skyrocketed (a girl after my own heart!).  And again, there’s no question that it’s a very deliberate sign, and very clearly the sign for “cheese” and not something else.

In the physical skill department, she has now perfected pulling herself to standing and started crawling. OK, actually her crawling is kind of pitiful-looking, but it definitely qualifies as crawling.  Here is a video of each!  Note her very self-satisfied crowing after arriving at standing :)

In terms of eating, she’s pretty much given up daytime nursing for the moment.  I offer, but she mostly just screams, arches her back, and tries to throw herself on the floor.  OK, then!  And quite frankly, that's far preferable to biting.  It does mean that she makes up for it at night, but we’re just co-sleeping a lot and powering through the sleep deprivation for the moment.  She is quite good at feeding herself solids, though, and my mom notes that she’s got an interesting method of grabbing food.  Apparently, I was a textbook pincer-grip baby (daintily picking food up with only thumb and forefinger), and my younger brother was a grabbing scooper (repeatedly clenching his fingers while scraping the tray with his whole hand - think PacMan - to get the biggest handful possible before shoving the whole load in his mouth), but Maya often uses a “hooking” technique where she lays her hand to the side and uses just her forefinger as a hook to trap food against her thumb or palm.  My mom says that’s pretty weird, but it works :)

A few of her current likes and dislikes:

Loves: 

• BATHTIME!!
• all dogs
• music (more Raffi, all the time....)
• being outside
• reading books!
• having someone hold her hands and walk her around...and around...and around....

Hates: 

• face wiping
• diaper changing
• getting dressed/undressed
• naptime

We very much enjoyed our trip to the Eastern Sierra.  We hiked all over and had a blast - baby LOVES hiking.  It was easier to carry a 22lb baby at 10,000ft than I thought it would be, but it is definitely time to upgrade to a *real* baby-carrying backpack instead of the Ergo, which maxes my shoulders/upper back after 5-6 miles.  We saw lots of American Dippers (one of my very favorite birds) and Clark’s Nutcrackers, a life-lister White-headed Woodpecker, and one cute little Thamnophis elegans at about 8000ft.  It’s been so great to see my family, but tomorrow we fly back to the North Country and I try to make up for the work time that I missed while galavanting out in California for two weeks.  Let’s hope the transition back to daycare goes well, too!  I’ll have to do another post on that sometime too, but the short version is that she’s doing slightly better - or rather, was doing slightly better before I hauled her away on vacation.  Keep thinking good thoughts for us!

And I’ll leave you with a few photos from the trip....