9 Months!

My precious boy turned 9 months old today! NINE months! That seems so long, and yet so short. He is growing and developing by leaps and bounds! I guess our biggest developments this month were teeth and mobility. He has 4 teeth now - 2 bottom, 2 top. And he's still army crawling, but getting faster and better every day! I finally invested in a safety gate because one of his new favorite things to do is make a break down the hallway when I'm not looking. So I'm going to have to gate that off so he can't leave the room on me! It's dangerous even in the living room with me, though, because his favorite thing to do there is crawl under the end tables and play with the lamp cords. Geez! So the lamps have to go too. On my list of things to do next week is do a thorough baby-proofing where I crawl around on my hands and knees and get a baby's-eye-view of what needs to be changed to make it safe for him! Trying to decide between installing cabinet latches and just moving anything potentially hazardous to a higher location... (I'm afraid cabinet latches would prevent Justin and me from being able to get what we need, too!)

Now that he's so mobile, though, we're trying to come up with ways to keep him contained, yet happy when we have things we need to do and he's awake. So far, his favorite option is still the old standby Exersaucer. He can seriously stay in that thing like 30 minutes, if needed. Another newer option that he likes most days is a walker that his Cousin Joshua handed down to him. He hasn't entirely figured out how to make it go yet, but he really likes the music it plays. That's usually the option we go for when I need to contain him while cooking dinner, since the kitchen is a tile floor where the walker works best. We also recently borrowed a Johnny Jump Up from some friends, and we thought he'd LOVE it since he's so active with his legs. He's only been in it twice, but it hasn't been the big hit we thought. Usually he bounces for about 5 minutes before he starts yelling to get out.

Another new thing this month is shoes. I've tried putting shoes on him before, and he SCREAMED at me and kicked them off. But he's getting big enough now, and I'm getting tired of people asking "Where are his shoes?" So I instituted the rule that he has to wear shoes whenever we leave the house. And really it only took one time of fighting and wrestling to get them on, and then he was fine. Now it's not a battle at all to get him to wear shoes. And he's SO DARN CUTE in them!
At each of his 3-month milestones previous to this, we've gone to Wal-Mart and gotten portraits made. However, after having a bad experience at Wal-Mart for his 6-month portraits, we decided to try to take some cute ones at home for his 9-months. Errr, this is the best of what we got:Cute, but not incredibly professional looking... He just wouldn't sit still! He kept crawling at the camera and trying to grab it... (You can see that we even tried bribing him with his Jimmie Johnson toy car... Didn't work.) Maybe we'll go to Wal-Mart after all... :)