To start, Montgomery turns 9-months-old today! She is still very petite for her age, with a small frame and from what I can tell on the scale, weighing in around 18 ½ pounds. We go to Dr. Cook this month for a wellness check up so I will know more after that. She is really starting to balance well on her own and has even taken a step or two here or there, but no definite moves toward actual consistent walking.
She continues to be VERY vocal – constantly chattering away in her own baby language. I can make out a few words here and there that she is trying to mimic from us. She says mamamamamamamamam a lot but that doesn’t really mean MaMa – it means “pick me up”!!! She says it to everyone. We’ve mastered “uh-oh” – she says that all the time for everything!
We had a fun first Christmas. Scott and I only got her two small toys because we figured she is still too young to really understand the concept of gifts. She had a good time opening the gifts she got, although she was more interested in the wrapping paper, the tags, and the Christmas tree ornaments than the gifts themselves! Next year will be more interactive.
I think the biggest milestone we’ve hit is sleeping through the night – yea!!!!!! We were having her sleep in the bed with us and she was still waking up twice a night screaming for a bottle, so we just kept her in the bed so we could pop a bottle in her mouth and go back to sleep. Of course I loved having her there to snuggle with too, but Scott wasn’t quite so keen on it! We got to the point where we were both ready for her to start sleeping in her crib in her room. Of course being the overanalyzer that I am, I read up on a few different methods to accomplish this and the one I connected with best was by a Dr. Ferber, who says you basically put them in their crib at the same time every night – without a bottle or rocking them to sleep – and you can stay by their crib to reassure them for about 60 seconds and then you have to leave the room. The child will predictably scream and cry and you have to wait 10 minutes before you can go in again and just let them know you are still there (not allowed to pick them up or rock them – just let them know they haven’t been abandoned). Then you leave again and they scream and cry and you have to wait 30 minutes before you can go back in, etc. You repeat this process every night until they eventually learn to self-soothe themselves to sleep.
Scott and I prepared for the worst – assuming she would cry for probably an hour or so and this would be a long and tedious process. We put her in her crib at 8pm and she cried and we left the room. She cried for about 10 minutes and I went back in and let her know we were still there and left the room (we could watch her on the monitor the whole time). She cried for about 3 more minutes and just stopped. She looked around the room and around her crib, found her pillow she likes to cuddle up with and she put her head on it and went to sleep! Wow – were we amazed that we got off so easy! She woke up once that night at around 2am and cried for about 2 minutes and went back to sleep on her own. The 2nd night we repeated the process and she cried for about 5 minutes and then put her head on her pillow and went to sleep. She slept through the night until 7am! Hallalujah!!!! Sleep at last!!! Some nights she doesn’t even cry at all when we put her in bed – she just puts her head on her “special pillow” and looks at us as we leave the room and she goes to sleep!
I swear, other than the difficult first 5 months when she had horrible reflux, she has been such a wonderful, easy, happy, loving baby. How did we get soooo lucky???
Here are some photos!
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