9 Months

Time is flying by. Esther's life so far has been a blur.

- She crawls. She started crawling the day she turned 9 months. In typical Esther fashion of being content with her current circumstances, it took her a while to realize that she could use it as a means to get around, not just get the toy that is two feet from her. Now at 10 months tomorrow, she is much more mobile.

- She takes two naps and usually goes down around 7-7:30 at night. She requires much more sleep than her brother ever did. I feel like at this point, we were pretty confident that Noah would sleep through the night, but that is definitely not the case with Esther. One, she is a very light sleeper and any tiny little noise will wake her. Two, anything that happens to her seems to affect her sleep. She gets sick, she won't sleep. She's teething, she won't sleep. Her world is altered in any sort of way, she won't sleep. I realize that this is the case with most babies, but it just seems to be extreme with her. I literally cannot remember the last time we slept all night without being disturbed. I am pretty certain it was before she was born.

- She likes to talk a lot and is quite loud about it at times. It definitely makes it difficult to keep Noah from yelling in the house. He doesn't always understand that it is okay for her to be loud, but not him because he is a big boy and knows better. :)

- She takes four bottles a day, but I am pretty confident that if we never gave her a bottle again, she would be just fine with that. I remember being nervous about weaning Noah off the bottle, but I am kind of excited about weaning her. Bottles are a struggle.

- She eats food three times a day. Usually yogurt for breakfast and maybe a little oatmeal or something like that, baby food for lunch/dinner. She loves Cheerios, but other solid/table foods are not her favorite. She just kind of holds them in her mouth and then starts choking on them later... aka, I fed her tiny pieces of banana for breakfast one morning. Probably close to an hour later, I was changing her diaper and she started gagging. When I looked, she had a wad of banana plastered to the roof of her mouth. Silly girl, just swallow!

- She is so happy pretty much all the time.

Although we are very tired these days, life with Esther is good and I can't imagine it without her anymore. It is definitely more trying, not necessarily from her because like I said she is always so good and so happy, but more from the interaction of her and Noah. It has mainly become that way since she started crawling. I don't know how many times a day I have to get on to Noah for taking things from her, not sharing, yelling at her, hitting her,laying on top of her... The list goes on and on. Hopefully sometime in the near future, he will just accept the fact that she can move now and choose to be excited about that and play with her instead of constantly fighting her. Wishful thinking I know. Anyway, back to Esther, we are so thankful that God has blessed us with such a sweet baby girl and look forward to each day with her.