Brantley: 9 Months

Brantley,

At 9 months old, you are in a stage of exploration. You’ve made some new discoveries this month, figured out how to play with some of your more interactive toys, and every day we see more of the world you didn’t know existed.

Here are the highlights from your 9th month of life…

One of your new discoveries is that you can splash in the tub during your baths. Up until this month we could safely bathe you in your blue tub in the kitchen sink but now that you’ve realized what a mess you can make, you’ve been upgraded to the real thing. This also means we could bring out the bath toys!

For Christmas, Nanny and PaPa gave you a swing and it was finally warm enough to hang it up in the front yard. You were a little nervous at first but after a minute or two you decided it was the most fun thing ever and you cry whenever we have to take you out to go back inside. You’re also learning to push off of Daddy’s hands.

We frequently sit you down on the floor in front of the coffee table and one afternoon you reached out to the baskets under the table and pulled out all of my coupons… little did I know that you would be interested in coupons, but I definitely didn’t think it would be this soon. We hope you’ll eventually help clip and organize them and not just throw them across the floor.

We celebrated your friend Braden’s first birthday this month. It’s so cute to get the two of you together but for the most part you still mostly ignore one another. Well, you watch Braden as he takes toys from you and then crawls away while you sit there helpless. But at least Brooke and I have a good time together.

We also celebrated Easter! Daddy was off work (thank goodness) so we spent the day between all of the families and finally settled back home to enjoy a quite Sunday afternoon with just the three of us.

Of course Mommy was excited about coordinating outfits.

And you loved to spend a little extra time with Nanny and PaPa!

Your first Easter Egg Hunt was a success, too. We obviously had to carry you around the yard to find eggs and you couldn’t care less about the candy inside, but apparently the eggs tasted yummy because they ended up in your mouth one after another.

When we finally got home, we got into some comfy clothes and showed you your Easter basket/beach bucket. You were pretty excited about the light-up bouncy balls and the little duck with spinning legs but otherwise, we were saving everything else for our trip to Tampa. And let’s be real, you don’t really know what’s going on anyway so it’s all good.

You really seem to love walks in the stroller but we hadn’t yet had warm enough weather for a bike ride until this month. We got you a new helmet, hooked up your bike seat, and Daddy has now started a new tradition of daily bike rides during “Daddy Daycare” while Mommy is at work. You absolutely LOVE it!

Your new favorite game is playing ball with Daddy. He rolls you the big soft soccer ball and you catch it and try to roll it back.

Also, when you play this game with Daddy you give us the craziest biggest and most animated smile! It cracks us up every time!!

This month you’ve also discovered your ears and ours, too. We’ll watch you flick your ears while you’re trying to fall asleep and you also like to slap our faces to the side to see our ears like “Oh, you have those, too???”

You’re still not doing much babbling (AKA: no consonant sounds), but your speech therapist Mama is trying to keep her “Mommy” shoes on and leave the “Therapist” role at work. In the meantime, you really like to take turns making noises back and forth which is still a good sign. 🙂

We love you, Bug.

Happy 9 months!