9 months old!

Our sweet baby girl is 9 months old! I can't even believe it! Mackenzie is as sweet as ever and such a good, easy baby. The biggest change is that she is sleeping in her crib full-time now!!! WooHoo! If you don't remember, at about 1 month old, she would only sleep in her swing. She slept so well there and I didn't want to fight it, so we let her do that until just recently. We tried little by little to get her in the crib and she would usually sleep there a couple hours at night and half of her naps and then demand to be put back in the swing. I might not have tried so hard, but because she's getting heavier, the swing goes through batteries alot faster now and D batteries aren't getting any cheaper! But the final straw to get her in the crib full time was that the swing broke! Now a swing should last much longer than 9 months, but when you think how many hours that thing has run, no wonder it died. So we had no choice but to use the crib, and she's doing great! She goes to bed around 8 pm and will sleep until 7 or 8 am usually waking once around 5 am to have the binky put back in her mouth. I used to feed her at that waking, but she doesn't need it anymore, so hopefully she'll sleep all the way through soon.

As for her physical development, she can sit up by herself and loves to play with her toys on the floor. She loves to rock back and forth on her hands and knees, but still hasn't figured out how to move forward. She especially loves toys that rattle, have tags, have texture, or just has a good end to chew on. She loves to look at books, but Rylan is having a hard time with this. He still views all the books as his and he doesn't like when she has one. The toys aren't an issue, because he doesn't remember the baby toys being his so she has her own toys, but books are different. We're working on that. :) She is still just a little peanut, only about 16 pounds. She's in the 10th percentile for weight and 60th for height, so it looks like she'll be tall like her momma!

Mackenzie will eat anything you give her and she hasn't turned up her nose at anything, peas, carrots, prunes, she'll eat it all. She LOVES the little cereal puffs we've been giving her and is getting really good at picking them up with her thumb and forefinger to get them in her mouth. We have to monitor this closely though, because Rylan will sneak by and steal them off her tray! She prefers thicker food, and even though she still has no teeth, is good at chewing with her gums.

She loves to talk and is constantly making noise. She says da-da-da-da, ga-ga-ga-ga, ba-ba-ba-ba, and a few times, I've heard ma-ma! When she's playing contently, we often hear a light little sing-song voice and it's so sweet! When she's really excited, she just screams and squeals non-stop. Wow can that girl hit the high notes! It's ear-piercing at times, but we love it.

And speaking of ear-piercing, look what we did yesterday!

We got her ears pierced!!!! We had talked about it when she was about 4/5 months old, but she had just started pulling on her ears alot so I figured we would have to wait a couple years, but she hasn't been touching her ears at all lately, so with some persuasion from Grandma, we went for it. She cried for about a minute and I felt terrible, but she was smiling again before we left. She hasn't touched them at all and is really good when I clean them. You have to admit, they are just adorable! Now there's really no mistaking her for a boy!

Just a quick snapshot of Rylan. To show our love for Fargo, we doned our bison-gear yesterday (much to Nick's chagrin). I had a Bison sweatshirt on too, but I hadn't taken a shower at this point yesterday so trust me, you didn't want me in the picture!