Nine Months (finally): On the Move

Dear Miriam,

You are nine months at last, a milestone that feels almost as big as your birth. You've finally been out as long as you were in, and where those nine months crawled at a snail's pace, this nine months has flown.

This month brought your first camping trip, and you handled the extended playgroup session like a trouper. You weathered the cold night, even though in retrospect we didn't bundle you up nearly enough.

It also brought your first forays into real food, which you love much better than that flavorless single-ingredient stuff. You like curry powder and chile powder and you will tear off fingers in your excitement to get to chicken noodle soup. You love fish and anything orange, and when the chef at a bistro in Paris prepared a special plate of sauce-less roast cod with carrot and fennel mousseline, you dug right in. You still prefer to be fed, and seemed generally weirded out by many textures, such as mango or the torn up baguettes we kept trying to give you throughout our stay.

You are also officially crawling. You are the most hilariously deliberate creature, I think you refused to crawl until you knew you wouldn't get stuck on your belly, and even now you hold your right leg up most of the time, as if poised to resume sitting. And crawling is noisy business, accompanied by grunts and squeals and gurgles that get louder as you get closer to your target. You started crawling two days before you turned 9 months old, and you're still quite cautious, reserving this effort to the few feet necessary to reach a toy or an electrical cord, your obsession.

You're so much a part of our lives that I can barely remember when you weren't with us. I mean, you weren't with us when we were swooping down the mountain on skis or bikes, or in that mosquitoe-ridden, Ganges-River-view-having hotel room in India, or my suprise 30th Birthday get-away weekend, yes, I remember that, but oddly enough, that doesn't bother us at all.

Sure, life was different then, and there are some things we just don't do anymore, but you have made our life so rich, so filled with laughter. I'm glad we have those comparisons so we understand exactly how happy you make us.

Love,
Mom