My baby girl is 9 months old today. We weighed her on the bathroom scale the other day and she’s only 14.5 pounds. Little girl! But she is growing so much in other ways.

She signs “milk,” “more,” “potty,” “finished,” waving hello and goodbye, and most recently “diaper” and “want.” At first she was using “milk” for want… like if I had a toy she wanted, she would firmly sign “milk!” and bounce, looking at the toy, but then I started using “want” to show her, and she picked it up super-quickly.

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She CRAWLS allll over the place. But only when SHE wants to. The whole “come on, baby! Come here to Mommy!” thing doesn’t work on her.

She generally is only motivated by awesome toys. Or non-toys, like business receipts I’m organizing. Or dog toys.

She has also started to get better at eating. After 2 months of experimenting, she chews and swallows SOME food now. If you want to follow her baby-led solids adventures, be sure to visit my other (multi-mama) blog. www.babyledweaningblog.com

A while back (the last time my husband was home), I would put Anneliese to bed at 7, and when she woke at 10, he would cuddle her back to sleep, and she would sleep until 1am. I would nurse her back to sleep but she would wake up only a couple hours later, and then want to be ON me for the rest of the night. So basically, she was having 6 hours of non-nursing sleep, but it was all while I was awake (since I didn’t see much point in going to bed before I knew she was about to wake again).

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For the last almost-week, her daddy and I have been trying to move her non-nursing hours to midnight to 6am. Maybe it’s because she’s napping better, or maybe because it’s lighter longer, but Anneliese has been going to bed around 8 or 9 lately. If she goes to bed around 5-6, whereas earlier we would consider it “early bedtime,” now we consider it a late nap, and fully get her UP after she wakes, even if it’s 9pm. After she’s awake for about an hour with some low-key play, maybe dinner and bath, reading, and nursing, we put her back to bed.

Then when she wakes up between 11 and 12, I nurse her again and put her back to bed. My husband has been taking over from 12-6, and most nights she has been pretty easy for him to get back to sleep. One night she even slept the entire 6 hours, which is basically the longest stretch of sleep she’s had…ever! So sleep is getting better.

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And just so you know, if you’re planning on trying something like this, and nursing? Be prepared for your breasts to be CONFUSED. The first 2 mornings of this, I woke up with rock hard breasts, and had to go pump to get them comfortable again. But it only took those 2 days before my body figured out that it didn’t need to make so much milk in those early morning hours anymore… and I guess now I make more other times of day, more spread out.

Even though she is sleeping better since the dawn of crawling, she is still having teething pain, and her top gums are super-swollen (FOUR teeth at once) but they haven’t popped through yet. It seems like it’s taking forever!

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Anneliese is so much fun. I love every bit of her. I can’t believe she’s been in the world almost as long as she was inside of me. Pregnancy seemed to take FOREVER, and her first 3/4 year has seemed so quick. Then again, I can hardly remember ever not knowing my sweet daughter, who is such an important part of our family.

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