(VIDEO) – Athena is now 9 months old and you wont believe how many  milestones she has hit this past month. She made her first successful attempts at crawling and since then has been exploring her new found freedom by trying to crawl all over the house exploring new places; every day getting better and better at crawling. She has also taken her first few assisted steps using her lion walker.  For some time now Athena has babbled the words mama and dada fairly clearly but she says them without purpose. Just a couple of days ago Athena said her first official word, Bravo! She says it with purpose and correct context. She loves saying it after we say bravo to her, while clapping, and she says bravo after we sing to her.

 

Some of Athenas favorite activities include staying up late and sleeping in. She also enjoys getting into her diaper bag and taking everything out, bit by bit. She enjoys paging through her books and gnawing on the pages. she likes going up to the entertainment center and pulling out DVDs from the shelf one by one. She also loves being sung to, most notably the ABCs, Twinkle Twinkle, and The Itsy Bitsy Spider drives her absolutely wild with excitement! Athena has been to the park before but on our last trip Jennie and I got the courage to put her on a swing and boy did she love it.

Athena continues to love her leche drinking an average of 36oz a day. Her favorite foods include snack puffs of any kind, blue berries, and spaghetti. Something that gets Athena really excited is drinking icy cold water from a straw. She doesn’t know how to use a straw yet but she loves it when I take a straw, dunk it in cold water, form a vacuum at the top with my finger tip and then drop the water in Athenas mouth as if it were an eye dropper. Athena keeps growing and growing, seemingly, by the minute. She weighs about 26 pounds and is about 30 inches long putting her in the 95th percentile for both categories. Her two bottom teeth continue to grow and her top front teeth are showing signs of popping out any day now.