Ashley is 9 months

It is hard to believe how much Ashley has grown and changed over the last few months. At Ashley's 9 month check up she weighed in at 16.5 lbs and was 28 1/4 inches long. I knew that she was going to be a little low with her weight because the week before she had the stomach flu and was not quite eating like she used to. But now she is pretty much eating like she used to but has started to let us know her likes and dislikes for food. When we feed her she likes to shake her head no while she is eating. Sometimes she is just being playful about but other times she is trying to tell us that she does not want what we are trying to feed her. The other night Tim was feeding her some roast beef (she only ate 1/2 the jar) and it was taking a while. Then, he switched to squash and she gobbled up the whole jar in less time than it took to eat the roast beef.

Ashley has become more mobile since the last post. Just before she turned 8 months old she started crawling. Shortly after she started crawling she began to pull herself up and walk along the furniture. Now her favorite thing to do is to hold on to our fingers and walk to where she wants to go. If she only has to go a short distance she will just hold on to one of our hands to walk. She doesn't quite trust the walking toy that we have, but she has used it to walk a short distance on her own. It would not surprise me if she is walking on her own in the next month or two. Logan started walking by himself at 11 months and Ashley has been right on Logan's heels for every milestone.

Some other things that Ashley has been working on are putting sounds together. She will start to say a sound and if you repeat the sound back to her she will say the sound again. A commonly heard sound is ma or mamama. When she wakes up from her naps or in the middle of the night, it almost sounds like she is calling for me because she is crying mamamamama.

Ashley now has two teeth so beware if you stick your fingers in her mouth. She got her first tooth on New Year's Eve and the second one about two weeks later. Since she has gotten her teeth, she has started to like the idea of putting solid food in her mouth. She now likes to eat puffs and cereal. Every now and then we will find a leaf, or twig or some grass in her mouth because she still likes to put anything and everything in her mouth.

Ashley loves to look out the window and see the world around her. She enjoys going for walks in the stroller. The other day we went to the zoo and I would get her out every once in a while so that she could see the bigger animals moving around. We also took her to the playground and she got to go down some slides by herself (one parent at the top of the slide and the other at the bottom of the slide). She seemed a little shocked by what was happening but enjoyed it. She is starting to become a big girl and we get to have more fun with her as she grows.