9 months!

Frankie is 9 months old today, and what a big girl! Here's what she's up to these days:

• Crawling. She's still not super-fast, but the army crawl has turned into a proper crawl, and she's much more willing to crawl to get places now . Especially when she sees Momma or Daddy across the room, or Maisy's stuffed chipmunk (seriously, why does she always want to play with the one toy that belongs to our dog and is nasty?)
• Cruising. This is her favorite pastime right now. She'd spend all day standing and moving laterally up and down the room using various furniture to hold on to if we let her. This has actually been quite nice for me, because she's good enough at it that she doesn't usually fall, so I don't have to be right there with her.
• Pulling herself to a stand. It's still amazing to me to walk into her room and find her standing up in her crib!
  
• Dancing. She shakes her head back and forth, and bounces up and down on her legs. So cute. She was doing this at church yesterday during worship.
• Recognizing words. When I ask her where the dog is she turns her head until she finds Maisy, and will often point at her. She also understands milk, momma, and daddy (at least that I can tell, there are probably many more!).
• Sleeping from about 7 or 7:30 until 5:30 most nights without much waking in the middle. She usually takes 2 90 minute naps during the day (one at 9, the other at 1:00). I'm hoping that as she nears a year she'll start sleeping longer again at night, but I really can't complain.
• Eating mainly fruit and carb-loaded snacks like Cheerios. She's always been a bit of a picky eater, and recently she's started "holding out" at meal time for something better if I'm serving her vegetables or meat (she will eat some chicken and beef these days). I've decided we have to draw a hard line, and have not been offering her additional food when she starts doing this. In talking with Melanie (one of my founts of child-rearing wisdom), she advised to start working on this behavior, because what it can easily turn into is mom or dad making several meals during the course of the meal in the hopes that the child will eat one of them, which leads to a lot of waste, and starts to get ridiculous. Instead, I'm trying to determine before we sit down what Frankie should eat for the meal, which always includes at least one thing I know she likes. As long as there is some of that food left, and she's refusing food, I've decided she's either done, or it's a preference thing, and if she were really hungry, she'd eat the food I know she likes. She does usually like to eat whatever Chris and I are eating, which is helpful, and I try and encourage this by giving her some of what we're eating when I can. In this way, we've discovered that she likes flavorful food, even some with a little spice to it! The goal is eventually to get to cooking one meal for all of us.
  
• Not stacking blocks on an 18-month-old's level. Actually, not stacking blocks period.

Pictures will have to come later, we were too busy playing and running errands today to take our 9-month photo shoot!