Baby Thomas is 9 months old!

Hrm...*very* nearly not Baby Thomas any more...so what's changed since Flyingpops' last post on his development?

At last weigh in (yesterday) he was 10.05kg (or very slightly above the "average" line, noting a gentle upward trend), he is also now in the 98th percentile for age/height ratio (i.e only 2% of other babies of his age in the UK are longer/taller) annoyingly meaning he has *already* grown out of many of his lovely 9-12 month clothes (almost three months early)...

He has three-and-a-half teeth, two on the bottom and one-and-a-half on the top, all of which are middle incisors (perfect for cutting up carrot/apple sticks, biting Mummy's chin and scratching Dad's DVDs)...

He has demonstrably assigned the noise "Adada" to me and "Emamam" to Flyingpops and will use the former when he expects to be lifted out of bed or lifted up generally when he spots me (complete with smiling and holding up his arms when I prompt "Come on then sunshine, hup") and the latter when he is wanting Mummy milk (usually in that order)...and "Bobobob" *might* be Popple (one of his bedroom toys) but the jury is still out on that one...unfortunately "ARGH!" (*bash*) still means "May I have some more food please, Daddy" (but we'll get there)... ;)

Food-wise he continues to be an absolute dream, he'll eat *anything* apart from sour out-of-season tomatoes (which get a *very* firm raspberry), but we'll see if that changes when the good, sweet British ones come along...he uses his teeth to properly chew and can cope with pretty much anything he is handed (although a lot does still end up on the floor, it's mostly due to extreme wide-eyed enthusiasm - "Thomas, do you really need to be holding five toast soldiers at once?" - sort of thing)...

He can now shift fairly comfortably between sitting and crawling positions (and vice-versa) and shuffle slowly around the room (usually backwards - but hey, it works!), can hold himself upright (on two feet) for 5 minutes at a time as long as there is something like a sofa to cling on to, but still needs rescuing fairly often when he gets a leg trapped or topples over a cushion...oh and once, he managed to get from crawling to sitting to standing up all by himself, prompting us to lower his cot mattress to the bottom setting (for fear of finding him on the nursery floor after a successful repeat performance)...

At Baby Swimming he now automatically turns to lower himself into the water safely, which is actually quite annoying as we are now supposed to be learning what to do if you accidentally fall in, and he sort of won't...well, unless physically thrown, but that is quite an unlikely scenario in real life, frankly... ;)

Most impressive for me, however, is his sudden (almost exponential) acceleration with careful motor control and attention to detail...over this last weekend the bashing has largely stopped, he can now - with one finger - pick out individual buttons, not only the big colourful, musical ones on his electronic toys, but after studying Daddy playing Xbox he can choose and push the tiny individual controller buttons, carefully choose directions on the D-Pad, and operate tiny cogs and levers on his mechanical toys...he also, again with a single finger, explores the books we read together for their various textures (all the while making his "curious" noise which sounds a bit like "Shh...Shh") and staring intently...

Absolutely incredible...