Beatrice, Month Nine

Congratulations, Beatrice - you're nine months old!

This month Beatrice has spent every spare moment pulling herself up to standing and then trying to walk. She is also crawling at an incredible pace, racing up and down the hallways chasing the dogs. She's very, very physically active, refusing to be held still for a moment - she's even taken to "swimming" in the bathtub.

To work through some of her excess energy we've been taking her to a lot of indoor playgrounds, children's museums, carousels, petting zoos, and science centers (it's hard to let B crawl freely at outdoor parks because the first thing she does when put down is to eat a large handful of the available ground cover: sand, woodchips, grass, or leaves).


Here she is having the time of her life on a carousel (click to enlarge and see the delirious look on B's face). I might add that she sat on a real horse that exhibited the full range of carousel motion, not one of those stationary benches for infants and cowards.

Dancing to Panjabi MC

This month Aunt Gillian came down to visit while Dev was out of town, then we took a road trip up to the Bay Area to visit her grandparents in Oakland. While we were there, we took Beatrice to the Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito - by the far the nicest children's museum I have ever been to, and highly recommended if you are ever in the area.

When not catching fish at the museum, Beatrice spent her time chasing our cats Odin and Andromache back and forth across my parents' house.

Beatrice continues to love trying any and all new foods, and she's moving on to more "adult" foods (Dev and I typically refer to them as "human" foods) like hard-boiled eggs, cheese, rice, tofu, dhal, cooked vegetables, and soup. For a treat we took her to IKEA to play with all the toys and eat macaroni and cheese for dinner. It was a huge hit. She also tried her first pickle at Aunt Mina's house and loved it.

"I ruined brunch."

Eating her first pickle.

Beatrice has been teething for months now, but still does not have a single tooth. Every morning I peer into her mouth, waiting. Every morning there's nothing there.

And my proudest moment this month: Beatrice vs. the Roomba. Beatrice was crawling around when she accidentally started the Roomba, causing it to roll over her fingers and (painlessly) vacuum them. She reared back, let out a whimper, and for the first time I saw a look of real fear cross her face. She retreated. But then, moments later, she charged it, chasing it back and forth across the dining room. Fear = mastered!

As always, you can find many more photos on Facebook or Flickr.