- Number of teeth – still 4
- Favorite book: same as before, but you REALLY like the page in A Book of Sleep that goes “Some sleep with both eyes open … they don’t even blink!” You try to poke at the wide-open eyeballs (which should give you an idea of what you try to do to Riley, Dad, and me), and you often giggle!
- New skills: Clapping (I wonder if you’re starting to sign “more” to me, but it’s so similar to clapping); pulling yourself up on all the cabinets and appliances in the kitchen; imitating me (you often speak after I speak, clap when I clap, thump the wall when I do … it’s adorable!); turning the pages on the books we’re reading together
- Current babbles: Baba, mama, mamoo, I even heard “mommy” once but I think it was because you were putting cheese in your mouth and “ma” came out as “mee”
- What makes you laugh:
- Surefire ways – imitating sounds that you are making (especially blowing air out of your nose, and clearing your throat), the sound of my pants/legs rubbing against your chair (I can’t believe this still works!), pulling up and down the window shade in your car
- Really random things (and totally inconsistent — what makes you laugh today may not work
Thump, thump!
tomorrow): playing Raffi’s song “Roots & Shoots” and putting my hands up in the air and down on the ground to correspond with the words. Oh, how you love it!
- Firsts this month: wearing shoes, waterfall hike (Lower Shamokin Falls in Wintergreen), watching a live webcast of a rocket launch, putting your feet in a rushing stream, insect bite on your cheek, thumping on stuff like a drum (walls, stool, cabinets, even my chest!)
- Favorite sleeping position: no change — still on your tummy and occasionally on your side. Sometimes, you roll around and accidentally turn on Scout (your dog doll that sings and talks to you) in the middle of the night. Freaky! 😮
A big round of applause for 9-month-old Eli, please — because that will almost definitely elicit clapping back from you these days! The biggest change I’m noticing from you these days is your love of imitating me! You clap when I clap, you spin things when I do, you throw the ball after I show you, and you even babble when I do! It’s so very flattering! 😉
Lately, we have several new routines, the most fun of which is that after mealtime (you’re now eating two large meals), I set you down on the kitchen floor and you crawl all over the place. You are starting to cruise with your walker, but more importantly (and cleverly), using your walker to scale your way to doors (where you love to bite the hinge), cabinets (thump! thump!), and the oven door (lick, lick). All I can say is that the lower half of the kitchen (up to where you can reach) is the cleanest it’s ever been!
Speaking of clean, believe it or not, you seem to love water so much that you go in the tub twice a day now! Instead of bathing you in the kitchen sink, we have migrated to the upstairs guest bathroom, so you can kick the water to your heart’s content without worrying about splashing water on the walls or things on the counter. Before your nap time, you just get a water bath with a little soap for your face and hands because they’re pretty caked in food. It also gives me a chance to wash off the sunblock you have on from our morning run. Then, before your bedtime, comes the real bath (i.e. shampoo and soap all over), so I can wipe off any grime from the playground or additional sunblock from particularly sunny, hot afternoons!
This has been a time of very quick changes! You started out loving the water coming out from the bathtub faucet (even going as far as to stick your tongue out below the faucet … I dunno, to drink the water??), which prompted me to scrub down the inside of the faucet the next evening. Then, one day, out of the blue, you just got scared of the water. (Actually, it was in the evening.) Nothing different, you just decided to be scared. And by scared, I don’t mean crying or screaming. You would just frantically turn to me, stick your arms out to have me carry you, and try to stand up until I turned off the water. And when I turned it off, you would smile and settle back in the tub. So strange, I thought. I wonder how long this would continue. Every day (technically twice a day), I would turn on the faucet, and you would reach for me. In fact, I would warn you, “Hey Eli, I’m about to turn the water on, okay? Here we go, 3 … 2 … 1. Psssh!” It got to the point where you seemed to understand what I mean just from the first part (“about to turn the water on”) because you would quickly whip your head to me, eyes rounder.
Would you like to hear how we solved this problem? I bought this little bad boy: 
It fits right over the faucet (the shower head trigger fits through the blowhole). Not because I wanted you to be less scared of the water (I didn’t know it would do that!), but because I didn’t want your head bumping into the metal, and I thought this would be softer for your teeth to bite into. (Sigh … yes, you were biting the faucet, too.) Well, whaddayaknow, the whale (Mr. Moby) made you not so fearful of the water! You’ve gone back to enjoying it (wellll … except that your prying, curious finger found the shower toggler* and the loud water sound freaked you out a bit. But you’re still generally amenable to the rushing water sound.)
Now that we’re on the subject of your curious fingers, your pincer grasp is now quite developed, and you’re picking up cheese and crackers like a pro. (Cheerios is now old news, though I still regularly step on a discarded piece here and there.) When you’re not quite feeling the food you’re eating, I bribe you with cheese. I say, “Cheese, Eli?” as I place it on your tray. And just as you’re concentrating on picking it up, I place the spoon at your mouth, which you usually open and eat. Isn’t that odd? 😀 I generally use cheese to gauge how full you really are. If you don’t eat it, you’re probably full.
Since Dr. Mayo has given us permission to feed you table food (the word for non-puréed baby food), it’s been so much more fun. You’ve had pasta and meat sauce (which you did NOT like because the wine did not cook off enough. I found out later that making wine-based sauces in a pressure cooker isn’t good because the alcohol can’t evaporate and essentially stays raw. So … yeah, sorry, Eli, I accidentally fed you wine when you were 9 months old. Is there an emoji with a sheepish smile?), Japanese chicken curry, and Chinese pork legs (ham hock/ข้าวขาหมู). You’ve eaten cilantro, pepper, and you even seem to like fish sauce (*huge sigh of relief *). Next to come is Vietnamese fish stew (cá kho tộ). Let’s call it your tenth month present! 😉
* So I’ve called it a trigger and a toggler. If I had to mention that part again, I would’ve called it a switch. Then, I realized I should probably just Google what that thing is called. Turns out it’s called a “shower diverter.” So, I probably should just go back and use the correct terminology. But isn’t it just more fun this way?
For the Vinh 