Months 6-9

I can't believe how these last few months have flown by.  You are learning new things every day.  You are growing (although not as much as we'd like to see).  At your 9 month check up you tipped the scales at 14 pounds 11 ounces, which is just barely on the growth chart at 1%.  You are 26" long which is a whopping 7% on the growth chart and your head cir. was 17 1/4" which is 44%.  So we have determined that you definitely have a biggie ole noggin for that growing brain of yours.  You are very active.  Just after your 5 month old post, you started crawling and have not slowed down since.  You mastered the stairs last month as well.  You now venture all over the house looking for things to occupy your busy little hands.  Your favorite thing to do is crawl into your room and take EVERY SINGLE book off your book shelf.

We still battle the "spitty baby".  We took you to a GI specialist in Dec. who classified you as "failure to thrive."    This made me so angry because they measured you wrong and wouldn't go back and take a second measurement.  They wanted to run all kinds of tests to rule out diseases like cystic fibrosis which you clearly don't have.  They also wanted me to stop nursing and put you on formula full time, I told them I was not willing to do that so instead they told me to supplement each feeding with a bottle of formula that was mixed at 24 calories per ounce instead of the standard 20 cal/oz.  In addition to that they wanted me to add a calorie booster to your solids twice a day.  Needless to say we decided to get a second opinion.  We went ahead and did the calorie booster and formula supplementing and 3 weeks later we met with another doctor.  In 3 weeks you had gained just under 2 pounds.  The new doctor said you're gaining too much weight too quickly and to take you off the calorie booster.  Other than that he said you were perfectly healthy and not to worry about the reflux.  You should outgrow it by the time you are a year old.  In the meantime, we took you off the calorie booster as the doctor suggested and within a few short days, you stopped sleeping through the night.  You cut your first tooth during this time so we didn't know if it was the teething causing you to wake or if it was a growth spurt.  Pretty much the entire month of January, we adjusted many different things to get you back to sleeping through the night.  We finally called the GI specialist (the one we liked) back and asked if maybe you needed to go back on the calorie booster.  The nurse said it wouldn't hurt to try so I promptly ordered a new can.  We started adding a little to your food at night only and it seems to be doing the trick.  We've got our sleeping baby back.

Kinley's Tricks

• Clapping
• waving
• says "bye"
• gives high five
• plays peek-a-boo
• climbs stairs
• pulls up to standing position
• fake coughs/sneezes (I do have video of this and I will try to post it later)
• plays "night night" (this is where she lays down and pretends to be sleeping, but then pops up and you have to yell "wake up wake up"
• throws a ball (it's more like drops the ball)
• drinks from a sippy (hooray)