Adi at 9 months

Adi's journey to crawling has been largely in reverse. Just last Friday she started to make actual forward progress but for a long time she was pushing herself backward and ending up sitting. (The picture is an attempt to capture this motion). This was quite frustrating for her although she was ingenious at getting around doing what my dad named 'tush turns': going from sitting to hands and knees, then pushing back to sitting on the other side. I started this post last Thursday and have had to revise this paragraph about 3 times because she keeps changing what she's doing. Now she is definitively crawling- no army crawl, no tentative movement, she just started doing it. And rather quickly. Maybe it's a coincidence but she's also been exceptionally happy and easy-going this week.

She has been pulling up to kneeling, including in her crib, and once or twice has stood up. She will stand holding onto something if I set her up. And now she is starting to 'step' her feet if I hold her up to walk, although she likes moving the right foot but not the left.

She continues to love sounds and we try to come up with new and different ones for her. She'll repeat a "sss" or "thhh" with a big smile. She says a lot of "na na" and "da da" and a few times we've thought that she was referring to Dave with "dada" or me with "mama" but I'm not too sure. In the last few days she's been smacking her top lip in a way that I can't repeat, and will click her tongue or clear her throat if we prompt her to. When she's starting to get upset she squishes up her nose and mouth and breaths in and out really fast; she'll start laughing if I do it back to her.

She is waving "hi", but not "bye bye." (Adi's wave is horizontal whereas Mae's is vertical: for any geeks out there: their waves form an orthogonal basis that would allow us to form any wave if we could only figure out how to linearly combine them!) She has picked up on a lot of casual sign language: so big!, peekaboo, night night (she'll rub her eyes or lay her head on the floor). And she likes clapping a lot-- I think that's where the wave came from.

I was under the impression her first word would be mama or dada but no: it seems to be duck. She loves the rubber ducks and says duh when she sees it. And this morning it sounded like she said hi back to Meredith and ba ba when Dave was leaving for work.

As I said above, I've been writing this post for a week now so I'm going to put it up even though I'm sure I'm forgetting things. They are changing so fast that it's hard to keep up!