January already??

I can't believe it is already January again and Aaron is almost 9 months old. This picture of Aaron was taken at the house of our friends Crystal and Eric who hosted a dinner party last weekend for us and 5 other couples (7 couples total). Everyone had a baby, ranging from about 4 months old to 19 months. Crystal and Eric did an amazing job - with all those people and babies, I expected a buffet style dinner, but we had a multi-course, sit down dinner with a beautifully laid table (although I don't think everyone was ever all seated at one time). Before dinner, I fed Aaron in his brand new travel booster seat, strapped to one of Crystal and Eric's barstools.

This past week, Aaron's top two front teeth finally made an appearance. At least one of them did. Last time I checked, I could feel one tooth and the other was nearly there. And he's still chewing on his fingers in the side of his mouth, so I think he's working on even more teeth.

It also seemed about time to introduce some finger foods, so we've been experimenting with a few things. Rice cakes were fun, but he just filled up his mouth with rice puffs without swallowing and we worried about choking, so we'll try that again later. Pieces of ripe banana were well received, but not soft cooked carrots. And just yesterday we tried Cheerios (actually, Trader Joe's "Joe's Os") which were quite entertaining. He didn't get the idea to eat them, but he got a lot of practice with his pincer grasp, pushing them around the high chair tray, dropping them on the floor. He's going to be a great tiddly wink player - he can shoot those things off his tray quite well.

Today, after letting him play with some Os for awhile, I showed him how I ate them, then I gave one to Thom in front of them, and then he let me put one in his mouth. He ate about 3 total. Each time we were watching closely, waiting to make sure he swallowed them (which was hard to tell), and on the edge of our seats whenever he coughed, worried we might have to put into practice what we learned in our CPR/first aid class.

On the 17th, he'll be 9 months, and we can start giving him meat and wheat. I don't care about the meat as much, but the wheat opens up a lot more possibilities for foods, especially now that we are starting on finger foods - pasta, crackers, toast, pancakes...