9 Months

9 months today!!! We can't imagine life without our little Livi--she is our joy and our everything!

• I used to be able to leave her to play with some toys in her room or the living room while I started a load of laundry or finished doing my hair, etc. but now she follows me out the door saying, "Maaam-a"
• she says "Mama" when she needs something (food, sleep, diaper change, or to be held) and "Dada" when she's playing and having fun. So yeah, she pretty much has us and our roles pegged.
• She had been taking after her Aunt Kate, and preferring veggies to fruits. She now loves fruit, however and her favorite is mango.
• We pray with Olivia at meal time so she can get in the habit early on. Recently I was blessing some mixed veggies at lunch time and I was holding the jar in my hand. I naturally had my eyes closed and midway through the prayer, Olivia snatched the jar and squealed with delight. It caught me completely off guard, my eyes popped open and you can tell it's ingrained in me because before I could get everything under control again I had to quickly say 'Amen'.
• She can now pull herself up--the question for awhile had been how to get back down again--she would stand up in her crib and then when she couldn't figure out how to get back down, she would cry for us to come help. 
• We're forever changing the schedule around here. Just recently we had another change. Instead of three naps a day she's down to two. And I'm hoping by having them less frequent, they will be longer *fingers crossed*. 
• She learned how to clap her hands. I think she's been trying to get it down for awhile but she lacked the coordination to bring her hands together and would instead whack her belly like a drum. She does it all the time now and the clapping is usually accompanied by a little "yaaaay"
• Her hemangioma has indeed grown, as we expected it might. Remember how she has a benign tumor on her right eyelid? Well, when the ophthalmologist measured it at 3 months of age it was roughly 5x7 mm and now it is 6x9mm. It's not a lot of growth, per say, but it is a lot more noticeable. Where before you would really only notice it if she was sleepy or crying, now you can see it all the time and she looks tired because her eyelid is drooping. There is still some concern about it causing astigmatism. but at this point there may be more risk of trying to treat it. So again, we wait. We'll go back when she's a year old and see how it has changed. Hemangioma or no, she's still the cutest little thing.  
• At 17 lbs. 2 oz. and 27 3/4 " this is the very first time in Olivia's life that she is prepared to move on to the next clothing size on schedule and isn't 2 + months behind! She's even a little ahead of schedule, for that matter, and has been wearing 9 month clothes for a little over a week. You've got to see her chubby little thighs!
• She's pretty good at playing chicken. We get down on her level and crawl towards her real fast and instead of ducking or trying to run away, she comes at us in an army crawl as fast as she can, laughing. Since she doesn't know the general outcome of chicken, we usually end up moving aside and she wins.