Joel's Milestones at 9 months

Just checking in with a little update on Joel. He's sprouted his first two teeth, lower central incisors. The right one popped through two weeks ago and the left one about 3 days ago. I can see his uppers are on the way, also. He's taken to standing on his own, squating and pressing up to stand. He's quite pleased with himself about this. He frequently picks things up and stands up and says, "Ha!" in his growly little voice.  He's picking up more words lately as well. So far his list includes, Dada, Mama, No-No, Da-Bah (the ball), and uh oh.  I think we hear Da-Bah about 500 times a day. The boy is ball obsessed already. He's also signing Milk still and we are working on Food and All Done as well as signing other words as I remember to do them. He can also say Hi and wave. It's really cute. He has a Rose Parade wave. :)

He's back to sleeping through the night 10-12 hour stretches. Thank goodness. I was struggling for a while there with the teething waking him up frequently.  He's started taking long morning naps and short afternoon ones which is interesting to me. The girls were always the opposite. That's about it. He has his 9 month well visit next week. We're a couple of weeks late, but that's ok. :)

Brave Brooke

Brooke climbed this obstacle at the park today all by herself. I was about 10 feet away, watching her, but tending to Joel. As she was climbing I reminded her to be careful, but not wanting to be overly cautious and stifle her, I left it at that. Kids need to take risks and learn their limitations. That's hard for me as a mom, but John reminds me often to let them be kids. Brooke made it all the way to the top and then, I don't know what happened. She just seemed to let go and down she came. Miraculously, she cleared the entire climbing apparatus and landed feet first. I watched as her knees buckled and she fell forward. I ran to scoop her up, afraid she'd broken her leg(s). The playground floor is a slightly springy material, but she fell from about 6 feet high.

I sat down with her on my lap and she was crying. I asked her what hurt and she said her knees did. We lifted her skirt to find she'd scraped both knees a bit. I asked if her feet hurt and she said no. The next sentence out of her shocked me, but I was so proud of her. "Mama, I want to try it again." I said ok and carefully set her down so she could walk back to the playground. The woman next to me commented, "Oh good. She can walk." That's how scary a fall she took.

We went back to the obstacle, this time with me behind her, but I didn't help at all. She climbed all the way up and made it to the top again. This time, she made it onto the platform without trouble. There was literally less than a minute of comforting from me before she was ready to tackle that mountain again. What a brave kid.