[Yes, I missed out doing an eight month update. The run up to Greenbelt was just a little too mad. Sorry.]

Dear Elisabeth,

If I had to describe “Elisabeth in a nutshell at 9 months old” it would be something like this: Happy, sweet, curious, very social, cuddly & affectionate, busy when playing, loves food, loves to be the centre of attention.

I feel like we’ve conquered sleep – at least for now. You do really well sleeping through the night. I often hear you yelping in the middle of the night, but I leave you alone and you put yourself back to sleep quickly. You usually wake up around 5:30-6:00 am wanting to breastfeed but most of the time you go back to sleep, at least for a little while. It helps now that it’s not already bright daylight by 5:30 am. You take a long nap – two to three hours – almost every morning. The length of your afternoon nap really depends on where you are sleeping. If you are at home in your cot, you’ll sleep as long as two hours. If you fall asleep in your pushchair, though, your afternoon nap only lasts 25-30 minutes.

You love eating! You’ll eat a lot of different foods including just about any form of bread, all fruits, cheese, eggs, chicken, potatoes and pasta. You will not, however, eat vegetables. I keep trying, but you just make a disgusted face and spit them out. I’m trying to be a little more adventurous with what I give you, and recently you’ve eaten courgette & tomato risotto and carrot pancakes.

In the last few days you’ve just started to make some first movements towards crawling. If you want something that’s out of reach when you’re sitting, you’ll sometimes push yourself over one leg onto your hands and knees, but then you get stuck and need help getting back into a sitting position. It’s progress, though! Does that mean it’s time to start childproofing the house? You would still much rather be standing than in any other position, and you’ve gotten quite good at holding yourself up on furniture. You’ll play happily by yourself for a while but if I come sit near you, you immediately reach out for my hands which means, “Pull me, mummy!” It gets very tiring because you keep reaching down to pick things up and then want me to pull you back up.

Your absolute favourite toy is a basket of 100 brightly coloured plastic clothes pegs which cost me all of £5 at the supermarket. You love emptying the basket, clapping the pegs together, sucking/chewing on them, and pulling them off the clothes line. Sometimes it almost seems like you use pegs as a comfort toy – you just want to have one in each hand. You really like your stacking/nesting cups as well and you often sing and bang them together. In fact, clapping or banging things together is one of your favourite things to do. You’ll clap any two things together that you can hold on to: your feet, two different fingers from one of my hands, one of my hands and one of daddy’s hands, etc. We’re not sure where you picked up singing along with banging on something, but you do it fairly frequently, especially in the bathtub.

You love attention and respond – usually very enthusiastically – when people oblige and pay attention to you. You love seeing other kids and often get very excited, squealing and flapping, when you see them and want them to look at you. I still get loads of comments all the time from strangers about what a cute baby you are. You look up at them with those big blue eyes open wide, and they can’t resist you! You still stare and stare at strangers, but you’ve gotten more quick to smile at them too.

You are a very sweet little girl, Elisabeth! I love all your smiles and happy squeals and kisses and cuddles. You get more and more fun by the week!