Nine Months

Nine months old! For most people, nine months of age roughly represents the point at which their babies have been on the outside for as long as they were on the inside — their “Inside-Out Day,” as it was observed around here. Of course, I delivered my babies a bit early, so Julian’s and Eloise’s Inside-Out Day was July 4 — 36 weeks and 6 days after they were born. Needless to say, they’ve changed so much in the last nine months! (Though to be perfectly honest, they probably changed more during their in utero months, but I wasn’t able to observe that as closely.)

This month the babies’ engagement with the world has kicked up a notch. Their play is more complex: rather than simply shaking a rattle and passing it back and forth between their hands, they’re banging the rattle against other things, trying to pick up something else with the same hand currently holding the rattle, intentionally dropping the rattle and picking it back up, putting the rattle in an empty bucket and taking it back out, inspecting the details of the rattle with the newly isolated index finger, and handing the rattle to Mama when asked. This is not to say that there isn’t still plenty of sampling the exotic and delicate flavor of the rattle, but you can definitely see that their play has become more deliberately exploratory.

(Of course, their favorite toys are so often non-toys – something that I’m sure is familiar to many parents. The translucent tops to the Born Free bottles have long been a favorite item, along with tissue boxes, an unopened bag of tortilla chips, the mail, a Dunkin Donuts cup, a ginger ale bottle, one or more wooden spoons, a plastic tub that once held 340 pieces of Double Bubble gum, breast pump parts, an empty wipes container, and – most prized of all – Matt’s nametag from a recent Brown event, complete with lanyard.)

In addition to their increasingly skilled manipulation of objects, their sphere of attention and interest seems to have expanded. In the past, they’d play with toys we put in front of them, and they’d pay attention to big stimuli like a car driving past the house when we’re sitting on the front lawn, but they didn’t really seem capable of perceiving and observing ambient activity. Now, though, I notice that they are fascinated by people doing things around them — people throwing a frisbee at the park or kids playing on the swings, for example. Julian in particular seems to love watching toddlers and preschoolers run around, flapping his arms in delight when someone comes near us or looks at him. They just seem better able to make some sense of what they’re seeing. It makes life so much easier when we take them places — the environment entertains them so we don’t have to! (And that’s part of why it was particularly brutal to suffer through the least sunny June on record. A friend quipped that if Nature were really a Mother she would have recognized that children just can’t stay inside for that many miserable days on end.)

Of course, along with this increased attention to their surroundings comes an increased desire to get around. Neither baby is quite crawling yet, although both keep teasing us with promising lunges and determined grunts. Eloise can often stagger forward on all fours a bit, but Julian usually pitches forward onto his head and rolls onto his back before he can make any progress toward his goal. I think he may be able to do a somersault before he can crawl. (Fortunately he is a good-natured little fellow and, after a few squawks of frustration, will subsequently content himself with whatever is within reach.) Both prefer standing and cruising to anything else, and they will drum on the ottoman and make circuits of the family room furniture with great enthusiasm for long periods. This has created a bit of a traffic management problem, as they will often cruise right into each other’s personal space and knock each other over without a backward glance.

On the verbal development side, Julian went through an adorable phase of saying “blah blah blah” recently, and he often busts out with all kinds of fun consonants when he has cheerios in his mouth (I think they make him more aware of his tongue). Eloise went through a short phase where she would alternate “heh”s with me – she’d make one, I’d make one back, and then she’d look at me very intently while we took turns sounding like we were practicing our courtesy laughs. Also, sometimes the two of them will talk to each other, as long as you don’t mind defining “talking” as “alternating ear-splitting screams of delight.” In general, neither baby seems ready to wow us with a first word. Unless you count blah as a word.

It really does feel, however, as though we’ve entered the stage where they seem to do something new every day. You can practically see the little wheels turning in their heads as they start to realize that they have some control over their own environment and that, with a little determination, they can often make cool things happen. (Cool things like rolling themselves under the crib or pulling the old rainforest bouncy seat down on themselves, for example.) Of course, this also means that they are so excited about life that they often want to stay up much later than their usual bedtime, and a few times they’ve woken up in the middle of the night and played happily for hours while their parents cry with exhaustion. These days they really seem to love the world they live in, and they don’t want to waste any time sleeping that could be spent clapping or drumming or creating din at the Leapfrog musical activity table.

Month nine also brought some travel, most notably to Lake Winnipesaukee for a family reunion, where they got to meet their 47 closest Spaulding relatives, including their cousin Kasey, just 6 weeks older than they are. Between all the commotion, the disrupted sleep (all four of us shared a room), and a bug they both picked up somewhere (the sickness kind, not a literal bug that they picked up, though I could pretty easily imagine that happening too), I think they were a little overwhelmed by the whole experience. We’re heading back up in August, when there will be far fewer people, and I am hoping that they manage a bit better on that occasion. When I was pregnant I always used to imagine bringing them up to the lake, so even with all the fussing and hassle and disruption of routine, it’s pretty great to be taking them to a place I love so much.

So the trend toward easier and more fun continues, no question. We do still have challenges, though. The babies are pretty willful and aren’t slow to resort to screaming when something horrible is happening to them, such as being seated in high chairs without any Cheerios on the trays. It has forced us to think a little bit about our discipline philosophy, early though it may seem. We’re not wild about the idea of giving the babies whatever it is they want in response to their screaming, but on the other hand, we don’t want to be hardasses and not respond to their screams when maybe it isn’t the end of the world if all they ever eat is Cheerios instead of Matt’s delectable lemon pea risotto. Most of the discipline books out there seem to be meant for toddlers and up, so right now we’re kind of just inconsistently winging it and probably permanently scarring the children.

I was remarking to Matt last night that this post seems to be just a laundry list of what Julian and Eloise are up to these days, and it’s lacking the introspection that characterized some of my earlier monthly posts. I think that’s because I’m simply less tormented by the babies and my transition to motherhood than I was for a long time, and I’m really having fun with them right now, so a reflection on my internal state reveals far less turbulence than it once did. And while I hope we can agree that this is a good thing, it does kind of leave me solidly in the realm of the plain old “hey, look how cute my kids are” mommyblogger. Well, so be it. Look how cute my kids are!

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