What my Nina James is like at 9 months and 12 days old

My Nina James is 9 months and 12 days old. Yip she is nearly one years old, nearly 365 days have past since this little creature came into our lives. I haven’t written one of these posts in a while and seeing as Sunday was Mother’s Day (hope you all enjoyed yours), I thought I would type one out.

Nina has changed so much, not only physically but mentally too, she is a real little character, a wonderful little character. She has started crawling and is all over the place like a intrepid explorer. I don’t think it’s going to be long before she starts walking, because she is pulling herself up onto everything and subsequently pulling everything down that is in front of her. There have been no ceramic casualties yet, but I’m sure that’s going to change soon!

She has 2 little bottom teeth and a couple bugging her up top, but they haven’t made an appearance yet. She likes to bite down on things with her newly found chops and it’s at this time that I’m a little relieved that I’m no longer breast feeding. If you look at some of her wooden toys you’ll see little teeth marks on them, which make me laugh. Nina likes her food, some things more than others. She doesn’t like apple flavoured stuff, which I find interesting because when I was pregnant with her I ate up to 6 apples a day. I think the apple industry in South Africa saw a major spike in sales during my 9 months. She likes sucking on biltong sticks and mango and she loves, loves eating paper. Yip, I have to watch her like a hawk if she has a box in her hand because before I know, it she’s gnawed through the corner like a hungry caterpillar.

She’s quite a busy baby, but she also likes playing by herself. One of her favourite activities is sucking on any remote or phone that she can get her baby hands onto. She sucked Craig’s phone so much the other day it stopped working and had to be soaked in rice overnight. Ha! Sorry Craig. Ps: that trick totally works.

We have a walking ring for her and even though we have done stacks of research and have heard many, many, many people’s opinions on the 4-wheeled contraption, we have chosen to let Nina use one. She’s allowed 10 mins a day in it, if you saw what she was like in this thing then you would understand why we’ve allowed it. She literally zoots all over the place like a crazy person. She goes so fast sometimes she even ramps the front of it up! She loves her walking ring and when she sees it, she lunges towards it with both arms up like it’s a long-lost 3rd parent. It’s very sweet.

Nina still doesn’t really cry for just anything, unless there are people she doesn’t know in the house and they want to hold her, she doesn’t like that. She needs a bit of time to warm up to you before she gives you any attention. On most occasions she cries when wants something, when something is wrong or when she is tired, other than that she’s pretty chilled. But when she does cry, you know all about it, yip my baby has a set of lungs on her. I often joke with Shane and ask him where he things they came from, I vote his side of the family hehe.

Nina says a few ‘words’, like babababa, dadada, mamama and then there are a few varieties of squeals and growls. My conversations with her are the best and I’m trying to appreciate every one, because soon enough she’s going to be saying real words and my baby isn’t going to be my baby anymore. Sigh.

I’m so sad that her baby phase is nearly over, soon enough I’m not going to be able to hold her effortlessly in my arms while I rock her to sleep. She’ll be doing all sorts of things like talking and running and probably using an iPhone better than me and the small things now, like clapping her hands and ‘suck-kissing’ my cheek will be things of the past.

I try everyday to appreciate and hold onto everything with Nina, even when I’m frustrated because it’s 10:30 at night and she has decided that she wants to play and not sleep. I may get irritated, but then I just think that soon enough these moments won’t exist anymore and she’ll be her own little person and playing with mom and an empty cereal box (babies love boxes) won’t be a priority. Ok I’m going to stop now, before I start crying like a sucker fool.

I really hope you all had a wonderful Mother’s Day yesterday, whether you were celebrating it as a mom or with your mom, hope it was a good one xxx

*This post was originally posted onto Tiny Pony