Nine in, Nine Out

Moses has now been out of the womb for as long as he was inside of it. Our sweet 9-month-old weighs 25 pounds, has 5 teeth with a sixth one poking through, and enjoys crawling and semi-cruising around the house. His favorite places to play are outside in the grass, the toilet (I usually catch him before he gets wet), and the refrigerator. Like his brothers before him, Moses loves taking vitamin bottles out of the fridge and shaking them. I'm sure it won't be long before he's feeding Papa his vitamins, too!

Moses has a good sense of humor and likes to play games. Whenever I change his diaper on the bed (which is most of the time since I've never understood the need for a designated "changing table"), as soon as I remove his diaper he flips over onto his tummy and quickly crawls to the nearest pillow. He plunges his face into the pillow and lies motionless until I exclaim "Moses!" and tickle him, sending him into a fit of laughter. If I don't tickle him right away, he looks up at me as if to say, "here I am, aren't you going to play my game?" He also loves to play with his big brothers, especially Joshua, who is partcularly good at entertaining Moses and finds great delight in making him laugh.

This past month, Moses has started eating solid food on a semi-regular basis. I wanted to wait til he was one year old, but he kept grabbing at our food and has been attempting to taste all kinds of edible and non-edible morsels, so I decided it'd be cruel to deny him any longer. Some days he wants to exclusively nurse and other days he insists on having a taste of every single thing I put in my mouth, so we just kind of go with the flow. His favorite foods so far are fresh pineapple, apples, and carrots (I "grate" carrot sticks and apple slices against his bottom teeth and he eats the resulting "puree"), yogurt with frozen wild blueberries, and baby crackers. He eats very few cooked foods. He also loves to chug cold water and diluted juice from a cup. If I'm holding a beverage glass, he'll grasp my arm and forcefully yank it towards himself so he can take a few sips.

Moses has started saying "ball", which actually sounds more like "bah." The first time I heard him say it, he was holding a toy orange. Other times, he said it while holding a whiffle ball, a kiwi fruit, a bouncy ball, and while staring at the globe-like pendant lamps hanging in Mimi and Papa's foyer. Since then, he's said "ball" at times when there were no ball-shaped objects nearby, but it could have been that he was just thinking about a ball, right? That's what we tell ourselves, at least :)