Our littlest girl is growing up way too fast, she turned nine months old this week! We are hurtling towards her first birthday far too quickly for my liking.

She’s such a good girl, no trouble at all, always smiling and happy and pretty undemanding overall bless her. She has the most infectious chuckle and it’s really easy to make her laugh, we are often just giggling away together at pretty much nothing!

One big change since her 6 month update is that she is no longer breastfeeding, she pretty much lost interest a couple of months ago so I decided to stop completely, it just felt like the time was right for both of us. A combination of her getting older, stopping breastfeeding and having more solid food has meant we finally have a routine, she is on three meals a day and three bottles of formula and although I’m not totally rigid with the timings, I pretty much know what to expect now routine wise (something that was never really true when she was younger and fully breastfed) which I have to admit is nice and it does make things easier now that Luna’s mealtimes are the same as for the rest of us (she certainly lets us know when it’s dinner time, she has ‘hangry’ tendencies like her Mama!) She is a pretty good eater so far, she doesn’t have any teeth but still manages to chew pretty well, I’m just hoping she carries on doing so well and doesn’t get fussy like Sienna and Freya!

Thankfully she has continued to be a brilliant sleeper and her routine has adjusted slightly, so that she now goes to bed around 6.30/7pm and wakes around 6.30am. This works really well for us, especially as she doesn’t cry when she wakes up, she just chatters to herself and waits for us to go in to her when we are greeted with the biggest smile ever! She only has one nap a day, but it’s a decent one, usually a couple of hours, and one longer nap fits in better with our routine than a couple of shorter ones which I think I would find quite restrictive.

She is very vocal, she’s always shouting and has been babbling for a few weeks now, she started quite suddenly with ‘dada’, we were all in the kitchen and she was in her high chair and we all suddenly did a double take as she sat there happily saying ‘dadadada’ just out of the blue. She also says ‘baba’, ‘rara’ and ‘gaga’ but I am still (not very) patiently waiting for ‘mama’!

After a few months of wobbly sitting up surrounded by cushions she now sits really well without a hint of a wobble, which is nice as she can sit and play with her toys (she especially likes banging two blocks together!) She can clap and has just started waving too and she copies us all the time (Dave pointed at her the other day and she pointed back!) She has also finally learnt to roll from her tummy to her back (she started rolling from her back to her tummy at about 4 months old!) She’s not crawling yet and I think that’s at least a few weeks away, but she can easily get from sitting to lying on her tummy although she does get a bit frustrated that she can’t actually go anywhere.

As for me, well I am loving these baby days and trying to soak it all up as time really is going too fast. I very reluctantly returned to work last week but will be doing three days a week with all the school holidays off so it’s about as close to the best of both worlds as I can get (I had forgotten how EASY it is being at work, to be honest, haha!) I have also managed to shift the baby weight at last, I have lost a stone and a half with weight watchers (I will blog about this soon!) which has made me feel so much better about myself and yesterday I wore my pre-Luna jeans for the first time, which I was super happy about! I think the ‘it took 9 months to gain the weight, take 9 months to lose it’ way of thinking is a pretty sensible one (let’s face it, the newborn haze was pretty much fuelled by cake, carbs and whatever I could grab while a baby was attached to my boob!) I have not rushed it, starved myself or done a silly fad diet of drinking nothing but green goo for days on end, it’s just been sensible, healthy eating (I honestly cannot recommend Weight Watchers enough, I love it!) and I feel so much better, it is lovely to feel more like me again!

I can’t believe that my next little Luna update will be when she turns one! I can’t imagine life without our little bonus baby, our lucky number seven.