9 month check-up

The Mooney household has been busy with milestones these past two days: Patrick had his 9 month check-up at the doctor yesterday, and today officially marks that Patrick has spent more time outside in this world than inside (more on that later).

So every month I document Patrick's growth with these awesome Cardinals onesie month stickers I got from etsy and do my own "mom" stats using our baby scale and some of his accomplishments for that month.  Well, every couple/few months we head to the doc for the "official" stats and check-up.  Naturally, I do different stat pics for those visits.

As I said in a previous post, it is getting increasingly harder and harder to A. get him to look at the camera B. smile C. do those both at the same time.  I probably have at least 10 bad pictures (see below) to the 1 good picture I get of him.  And I'm almost 100% positive that that ration will continue to get worse as he gets older.  Greattttt.  Better start reading "My Mom Snaps" even more.

This month at the doc everything looked great!  Patrick is still growing like a weed: 91% for weight, 87% for length/height, and 68% for head size (which we are THRILLED about, because for the first 6 months of his life he was well above 100% in that category. Dude had a huge noggin').

Much like his friends Huck and Camden, Patrick really enjoyed destroying the paper in the exam room.  More than once we had to yank teeny pieces of paper out of his mouth and from his fingers, and more than once someone had a meltdown about it.

After our great doctor's visit--where Patrick got a shining report and we were told we'd see our lovely doc again when Patrick is ONE (ahhhh! can't think about that now. Must save that anxiety for a future post), I realized that as of tomorrow (which is today--confusing, eh?!), my baby boy will have spent more time on the outside than inside cookin'.  WAHHHHHH!  Cue excessive mommy tears.  How has it already have been 40 weeks and 5 days--the same amount of time he cooked in my belly?!!  Time, you suck.  Why must you go so fast??!  So of course, to document this little milestone, I whipped up a nice little comparison pic via the A Beautiful Mess app (I so love that app).

After getting the go-ahead from the doc to start on small, soft solid food (up until now Patrick has only had pureed meats, fruits, veggies, grains--really anything he's eaten has either been pureed or milk), we decided to let him try to eat some non-pureed-solid food for dinner.

I cooked up some veggies (green beans, carrots, and corn), mashed up an avocado with a little milk, and some turkey meat.  Well, since this was his first big go-around with food that wasn't like liquid, he was a little overwhelmed; aka, he shoved as much in his mouth as possible.  Yeah, he choke-coughed like 10 times.  Nothing serious, just "I have too much in my mouth and my 6 tiny teeth aren't cutting it!" type cough.  We let him play around and "eat" this concoction of food for a good 10-15 minutes before we fed him some pureed food.

Since this was his first time with solids--and ours!--I think he did really well.  However, we didn't expect him to magically eat everything we cooked up for him perfectly and be content with that.  It's gonna take practice.  But I think tonight was a great step forward in eating solids and more of the food that we eat.  Hopefully he'll master this and become one with the solids and done with the liquids!  I'm hopeful: little man's hand-eye coordination is impressive: I think he picks up food and gets it into his mouth better than me.

Side note: how old does he look in this picture?!! Surely not the 9 months he really is!  Stop growing so fast little man!  And keep your fingers crossed for us that Patrick keeps the food choking to a minimum and keeps the food consuming (into his stomach) to a maximum.  I'm sure I'll report on more later in that regard.