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Sorry this post is a week late: Eli has just been keeping us so busy. Eli turned 9-months old this past week. With that achievement came a visit to the pediatrician. Eli has slimmed down just a bit relative to his peers, weighing in at 21 lbs (50th percentile), but he continues to get taller and taller, topping the charts at 30 inches (90th percentile).

Eli spent much of the past month up on all fours, rocking, and crawling backward. Yes, backwards. This would be quite impressive except that he was actually trying to go forward. We could imagine the frustration of trying to get to your favorite toy/person only to find yourself further away each time? Luckily, a few days ago he figured out how to put in drive and successfully crawled a few steps forward (captured on video below). Now he’s crawling all over the place! He’s also able to get himself into a seated position from laying down.

Eli continues to babble up a storm. He often says things that sound like words but don’t yet have meaning like “mum”, “hey”, “hed”. He really enjoys it when we repeat what he says and will go back and forth having a “conversation” for a few minutes.

Feeding Eli has been interesting this month. He’s not really that into breakfast yet, but for the first part of the month was eating quite a bit of pureed fruits and veggies for lunch and dinner. Within the past two weeks, however, he’s started only eating about half as much as before and then he will try to wrestle the spoon from us after a bit. But he’s started eating more finger foods (puffs, cheerios, cheese, carrots, string beans, etc.) and on Halloween we discovered he’s a big fan of garlic bread.

We thought our sleep troubles from last month had resolved themselves but Eli again started waking up 1-3 times a night and getting up earlier and earlier. Daylight Savings did nothing to help the problem (whoever invented time changes clearly didn’t have a baby). We’ve recently started some sleep training which is having good results. Eli can put himself to sleep at bedtime and naps with only a modicum of crying. He’s slept through the night the past couple of nights from about 8-5:45 (one morning til 6:55!) so now we’re just hoping to move the wake up time to a little later each day. It’s been suggested that, while counter-intuitive, an earlier bedtime will actually cause babies his age to sleep longer so we’re going to slowly try that too.

Eli is currently drooling like a waterfall. We can see two bottom teeth below the gum line and the pediatrician said they should both pop through any day now.

You can find Eli’s Halloween pictures below and see all the pictures from this month on Nicole’s Smugmug site. And I hope to shortly have some videos of Eli up.