Cate’s 9-month pediatrician visit was today. Her stats:
Weight = 22 pounds, 2 ounces (same as a couple of weeks ago); 95th percentile
Height = 28 3/4 inches; 90th percentile
Head circumference = still off the charts – I forget the number because they tell you in centimeters, and my brain doesn’t do metric.

Ok, 9 month milestones:
* Crawl, stand up, crawl, stand up, crawl-crawl-crawl, stand up again. Seems to be an ongoing theme in our house. She’s figuring out that because she’s mobile now, she doesn’t just have to sit and scream when I walk out of a room, she can follow me. And she does. Screaming the whole time.

* The cats are all now terrified of her. I keep trying to explain “gentle” and demonstrate it by lightly stroking her hand and forearm to show how she should pet the cats. I don’t know if it’s a lack of motor skills or if she just isn’t interested in my explanation, but she continually grabs a fistful of fur and yanks as hard as she can. They were tolerant of her at first (when she was tinier and her grasp was a bit weaker), but now they see her coming and head for the hills. Or the top of the bookcase. Whichever.

* I can actually see two tiny little teeth on her bottom gums. It’s so cute, I can’t wait until they come in all the way so I can get pictures of her little two-toothed grins. In honor of this new little milestone, I’ve started trying to brush her teeth with a little baby toothbrush, and man, she is not a fan of that. She screams like I’m trying to rip her face off. I don’t know how to make it any easier, I guess it’s just something she’ll have to get used to.

* Cheerios, oh, cheerios. How did we ever live without ye?

* Baby girl loves leather. Seriously, I don’t know why, but she’s got this fixation on belts and watches. She loves to chew on anything leather. I’m not sure what that’s about, but it’s kind of amusing. Earlier today, we went out to run a few errands, and after a long time in the stroller, she started to get fussy. So I took off my watch and gave it to her to play with. It chilled her right out. Go figure. She is such a lovable little weirdo sometimes.

* She has found her voice, and screeches for the fun of it all the time. I think she’s probably done it for a while, but it’s just recently gotten really loud. Like that “wow, everyone in the entire grocery store probably heard you” kind of volume. One second she’s hanging out in the cart, the next it’s “AYE-YA-DA-GUY-DA!!!” It cracks me up, but I still try to shush her if we’re out in public, because I know not everyone is a fan of screaming babies. Unfortunately, she usually thinks it’s funny when I shush her, so I get even louder happy squeals. Yikes. I try to shrug it off and figure that at least they’re happy yells, it’s not like she’s crying or anything.

* We’re working on baby sign language, but so far she has yet to sign back to us. I haven’t been very good about consistently signing, so that’s probably partially my fault. But she likes the Signing Time DVD that Cat loaned us, so maybe she’ll learn it more from that than from her spacey sign-forgetting mama. Patsy also borrowed the DVD so she can practice the signs with her at daycare, which I thought was cool of her. It’s funny, I occasionally send DVD’s with her to daycare because they’re the ones that I know chill her out (read: Baby Einstein), but Patsy says that all the older kids like watching them too. They call them “baby movies,” and ask for them every time Cate is there.

Speaking of daycare, I had the weirdest moment the other day when I walked in and one of the kids announced, “Baby Catie’s mommy is here!” (There’s an older girl named Katie, hence the need to differentiate: Big Katie and Baby Catie.) It’s very strange to be addressed as someone’s mommy rather than just me. Kind of threw me for a loop to hear that.

Nine months seems like a big landmark age because it marks the point at which your baby has been on the planet longer than you were pregnant with him/her. And that is a pretty big deal. I wonder if it’s why I keep having dreams about having another baby. They’re kind of disturbing because I never seem to have a “holy crap, how am I going to have two babies at the same time?” meltdown – and believe me, if I found out that I was pregnant right now, I’d probably have to be sedated. (As soon as the sedative wore off, I’d be filing a lawsuit against the manufacturer of my IUD.) No, in my dreams, I’m always freaking out over what we’re going to name the baby. Which seems like such a tiny, inconsequential thing compared to all of the other things that I would be freaking out about if this were to happen in real life.

But hey, I’ve been at this motherhood gig for 3/4 of a whole year, and I seem to be doing ok at it so far, so who knows? Maybe I’ll decide to give it another go at some point. Just probably not until 2010 or so.