9 months

Whew! I just finally put Benjamin down for a nap. He started one this morning, but woke up too early due to his loud mama. I'm paying for my mistake, believe me! 

Hmmmm....what has Mr. B. learned this month? The past 2 weeks have been pretty big. When we visited home, Ben had started pulling himself up and cruising a little bit, but now there's no stopping him! He pulls himself up on everything and has had a few spills. One caused a little blood, and another left a smallish goose egg. (And yes, we watch him.) At this point, all we can do is try to remove dangerous items and all obstacles, and then get out of the way. We received some wonderful new toys for Christmas, but unfortunately Ben is not as interested in them as I would like. I think his thoughts go something like this:

 "These toys are nice. Blocks. Hmmm...baby doll....more bl...WHAT!!!!! Someone left a REMOTE CONTROL right here on this TABLE!!!!! Let me see if I can get to it....hmmmm.....WHAT THE!!!!! Did you know that if you MOVE this BOX and scoot under this BENCH, and then MOVE this OTHER box, and then MOVE some more stuff, there are CORDS!!!!! Just RIGHT HERE out in the OPEN!!!! My toys are AWESOME!!!!!"

So,  you get an idea of what our lives are like right now. No actual crawling yet, but Ben will crawl about 4-5 steps and then drop down to his tummy and army crawl. He's getting pretty fast at it, and will drag himself across a room in a flash. Today I saw him stick one of his arms inside his shirt sleeve for some reason, and then drag himself across the kitchen floor with the other arm like he was in a war movie. It was very dramatic. The other day I left him in our little den for about 5 minutes, TOPS, and I heard him making these frantic noises. He always says, "ee-ah, ee-ah" when he's pretty excited about something. He started to get louder so I ran across the house and had to laugh when I saw him. We have a television antenna we aren't using, but had left on top of the tv table. Benjamin had somehow dragged this huge object ( bigger than him) across the room with him, and then tried to pull himself up on the laundry basket. When I got there he was sprawled on the floor holding onto the antenna with a pile of clothes and the clothes basket on top of him. Another comical thing about Ben being able to pull himself up is that can't quite figure out how to put himself down. Most of the time he just falls, and that takes care of it. But sometime I'll glance over and he's holding onto something and looking at me with panic as his legs s-l-o-w-l-y start to spread apart into the splits. I guess he'll figure it out at some point. 

Below are a few pictures from this month. Blogger only lets me post 5 pictures at a time, but I have more I'll post tomorrow.

Ben and his best friend Owen. Don't they look mischievous?

Benjamin had such a great time playing our piano the other night. 

The oven is Mr. B.'s favorite object to pull himself up on. He gets the added bonus of seeing his reflection in the window!

I took this a few weeks ago. He had discovered the swiffer and was doing a little dance. Now it's one his obsessions.

This is his other favorite place in the house. I've since put his measuring cups and other "toys" in the bottom drawer. He usually goes straight for this spot whenever he's in the kitchen.