Lil at 9 months

Here she is on her 9-month birthday.

Her favorite activities these last few weeks are:

• Standing at a coffee table or ottoman, and doing some balancing. I'd say at this rate she'll be walking before her first birthday.
• Crawling.
• Throwing things on the floor and then looking at them.
• Working on the second of her two front teeth.
  
• Feeding herself teething biscuits, pieces of banana, small pieces of cheese, or toast.
• Sticking her fingers in her food and lifting her bowl up to her mouth (photographic proof to come).
• Covering her head up with a scarf and playing peek-a-boo.
• Diving headfirst in to her basket of books and choosing the next book we read before bedtime--at least 8 times and sometimes as many as 20.
  
• Making this noise that is somewhere between a yodel and a gurgle.

Her baby days are dwindling fast and she's headed straight for little kid-dom. Sigh......

In other news, we have hired a more permanent babysitter. She starts on Friday. Her name is Pansy. She gets down on the floor to play with the baby. And she does light cleaning!! Needless to say, we are all pretty excited. We both love that we get to spend so much time with Lil every day, but we are looking forward to having some time to focus solely on work and not having to haggle -- "can you take her until lunch?," "oh but I have a deadline," etc. It was getting tedious. Sometimes odious. But it will all be over soon, Lord willin' and the creek don't rise (as they say in Alabama).