I feel that I need to explain why I have all of a sudden started to wean Maggie. Right before my post about beginning to wean her she bit me, hard. Almost to the point of drawing blood. For a few days I tried hard to not let her breastfeed at all, but I gave in and she has been good. I'm glad I'm not going cold turkey, it was painful and I think that slowly reducing will be better for her in the long run. It's going really well and she will even take a bottle from me.

She has been very slowly taking a step here and there, nothing like the four steps that she took that one time. Any day now though... Fun, but at the same time scary.

Check out my mom's new blog for Vitasource.

This week we have tried both weaning Maggie a bit and also getting her to sleep through the night more and they have amazingly both been successful. The first night that we let her "cry it out" she cried for over an hour, but the second night only for about twenty minutes at the longest and even less the following nights. Weaning has been easy during the day, but at night and in the morning she still insists on nursing. The first and last feeding are always the last to go I hear.

A new friend for Maggie was born this past week. Our friends Caroline and Jon had a little baby girl named Adrianna, I don't know if I am spelling that right, but I hope so. She is so beautiful. I hope that they are doing well now. They were doing well when I went to visit them after the birth. It really brought back memories of Maggie's early days. They were hard, but also wonderful.

Today Maggie and I visited with my dad's cousin Carol and her husband Jack. Maggie really took to Carol, they had fun dancing to the music on the radio while we drove back and forth from my parents house to Keene. They brought her an Elmo doll and book, which is great as I discovered that she is quite taken with Elmo when we went to Alex's 2nd birthday party on Wednesday night. I can't believe that Alex is two already. Seems like she was just being born.

So, Matt told me when I got home from work the other night that Maggie stood up, took four steps over to the beautiful new picture mat that Rebecca and Nathaniel sent over for her and sat back down again right in front of it. Amazing. Even I have gotten the oppurtunity to see her take little steps here and there. She is growing up so fast.

Tonight Matt took Maggie to see his sister's family while I worked late. They went far away without me :( I would have loved to go, it sounds like they had a lot of fun, and good food! I missed her terribly when I came home and they weren't here. It was nice to have a little time to myself though. It's a hard balance.

We really have to work on getting the house childproofed and keeping it that way. I hate having to take things away from her all the time. It is so much easier to just let her explore, pick things up, examine things, play. It seems like there is so little time. Matt and I need to just accept that we can't take time to relax I guess. Hmmm... but "they" do say that you need to take time for yourself. How does anything get done? Any suggestions?

Maggie is getting older all the time. She is now more than 9 months old. I have been lax about getting pictures of her up here, and even lax about taking pictures. It took awhile to find the camera after moving and now the battery is dead :( Ergh. The picture to the left here is Maggie playing the piano. If I'm really good I'll also upload the video I took of her playing the piano that day. I got quite a few good pictures of her that day as you can see with the beautiful picture of her sitting pretty and laughing away at the joy of playing with her chicken!
Several days, I think, later we got some great pictures of her posing with Daddy's hat! She is so cool. We recently had a great visit from Matt's parents and as soon as I get the pictures I took of them with her from my mom I'll post them. My camera was out of commision then, so I had to borrow from my mom.
Maggie has been doing a lot of new stuff. Her oldest new thing is pointing and trying to hand stuff to people. In this picture here she is tyring to hand Matt her Bunny Graham. (Yummy, drooled on food!) She is also walking along the edge of furniture like there is no tommorow standing on her own for several seconds on a regular basis and trying to take steps, she falls, but she is trying! I don't know if I have previously mentioned her waving or not, but she certainly loves to wave, sometimes even with two hands... hehe. One really cool thing is that she has learned how to play peek-a-boo with us. I have a video of that I have to upload as well. One night when I was getting her ready for bed I took off her shirt and began to use it to play peek-a-boo with her. Putting it over her head, and when she took it off we would say peek-a-boo. Then, she grabbed it and started covering and uncovering her face, it was awesome! Today she used the curtain in our bedroom and has even initiated games! Wow, she is so amazing.
I went to the doctor's with Maggie for her 9 month check up and you can see her chart on the left here. I was a little worried that she is so skinny, but the doctor said that it isn't a problem, she is quite healthy. It's probably beacause she gets so much excercise running around after Christopher. Katherine is going to have her hands full when Maggie really can run. Yikes.