Housekeeping at Nine Months

My beautiful boy,

I fear that we are in the waning days of what has been a pretty blissful few months. Every day you're closer and closer to crawling, and as you gain mobility you also have the audacity to want things -- sometimes things that you can't have, like the wires behind the stereo. And so I imagine the battles will begin.



But for the moment, you're freakin' awesome, and do not take my regression into the language of my teen years lightly. You are genuinely delighted to be alive nearly every moment of every day. Sometimes you wake up groggy from a nap and you spend a few moments staring into space and rubbing your eyes, and then as you slowly take in your room and your parents or whomever has collected you from your crib a smile creeps across your face as you realize that, yes, the world is in fact as wonderful as you remembered.



In all honesty, you were a little boring a few weeks ago, but it seems likely almost every day you now have some new surprise in store for us. Today you entertained yourself for a good half an hour with a rice cake. That rice cake was the greatest thing you'd ever encountered. You talked to it, you broke it into little pieces and then, best of all, you ate it. Then a few hours later, as I was feeding you banana, you decided you wanted to try to feed yourself with the spoon. A couple of times you actually managed to put the right part of the spoon in your mouth, and once or twice you also ate the banana off the spoon. You were very pleased with yourself.



Not surprisingly, your love affair with standing continues, except that now it's getting a little annoying because you have also learned how to stiffen your legs when we want you to sit, when we are tired of holding you up and just want you to put the tushie on the floor already, ensuring that you will remain standing. If we try to bend your legs for you you get genuinely pissed off. Who would want to sit when there is standing to be done?



You are currently able to sort of drag yourself around the floor, and sometimes you like to roll over and over in order to move yourself from one place to another. Full-fledged crawling is clearly only days away.



No words yet, and no teeth either, which is definitely something I am going to discuss with the pediatrician on Thursday. The only word-like thing you do so far is, when we say "cock-a-doodle-do" you reply "eee-eee-eee", which, as best we can guess, is your version of "cock-a-doodle-do", and perhaps something you picked up from the real live roosters who lived outside our house in Vermont last month. Which brings me to something that has been bothering me for a bit -- what's with the animal obsession? You must own about thirty toys that feature barnyard animals. Do the toymakers of America think that we all still live on farms?



Yesterday I was walking around the neighborhood, running errands, and I kept passing a woman who had clearly given birth within the last week or so, and her mother, who was pushing this woman's new baby in a stroller. The woman was all post-partum-lumpy and she looked miserable and exhausted. I had to restrain myself from putting my hand on her arm and saying what I wish someone had said to me: "it's going to be okay". I wanted to tell her that in nine months she would have some semblance of her figure back, she would have some semblance of a good night's sleep back, and she would be mother to an amazing baby instead of a screeching, demanding, semi-human pile of flesh. But I resisted the urge. I didn't want her to think I was a lunatic.

But it's true - life with you, Milo, is lovely. Now, on to the next phase, when you will probably regress into a screeching, demanding pile of overly mobile flesh. Yay!