Another month is gone, and this one is even crazier because we are less than two months away from celebrating Clara’s first birthday. How is that even possible?!

Clara is pulling herself up all the time these days and especially enjoys climbing on us. A couple of days ago, she attempted to move from one object to another while standing. She’s also really into letting go of whatever is helping hold her up, so I’m guessing she’ll be standing without support sometime in the near future. She falls almost immediately after letting go, but she just pulls back up and keeps going. It’s insane.

Though we can’t tell for sure, it looks like her top canines might be coming in. At the rate she’s going, her entire mouth will be full of teeth by the time her birthday arrives. Speaking of birthdays, I’m in full planning mode for hers. I’m seriously so excited to celebrate and have gotten a lot of menu and decorating advice from my dear friends. I’ve been working on her baby book so that we can have it out during the party, and I’ve got a long list of crafts that need to be done before then.

I’m a month late, but I want to get Clara’s nine month update on here before adding her ten month one. The month flew by, and Clara did a whole lot of growing up. At her checkup, she weighed 17.5 pounds and was 26.5 inches long. She’s finally moved up to the 25-50% for weight, which makes us super happy. She’s got plenty of adorable rolls on her legs these days, so we weren’t surprised she’d made the jump to the next percentile.

Between eight and nine months, she got two more teeth, bringing the total to six (four top, two bottom). Every time she gets more teeth, she grinds and clicks them together until she gets used to the new ones being there. It sounds horribly painful, but she gets a big kick out of doing it.

Just before nine months, Clara started pulling up to stand. She much prefers standing to sitting and will surely be walking soon. She spent most of December perfecting this, and now she pulls up on anything she can (including us, the couch, toys and her crib). She’s still crawling all over and now enjoys crawling down into the living room from our entryway, where there’s about a seven inch drop. It scares us to no end, but she laughs herself silly every time she does it.

She loves food so much that we can’t eat in front of her without offering her something. This is great most of the time, but it has proven to be difficult when we’re at a restaurant that doesn’t really have any baby-friendly foods. We went out for pizza, and I had to pull the vegetables off my pizza so she could have some. We’ve gotten in the habit of taking fruit or veggie pouches with us so that we always have something healthy for her to eat. She’s also discovered that Abby will gladly sit near the highchair whenever she’s in it, and she likes to toss food on the floor (presumably for fun, but we like to think it’s because she wants to share with Abby).