Nine months. Time flies. It doesn’t feel like a month has passed since I last wrote one of these posts.

Ingrid crawls happily around the flat and gradually discovers new parts of the living room. It seems to still be hard work for her, because she doesn’t like to crawl long distances, but it’s certainly made life more fun for her. Not only can she explore the world: she can also reach toys that used to be just out of reach, as well as wholly new toys (shoes are good!) – or simply show that she wants to play with me by crawling towards me.

The plants have survived her attention and I get the impression that she actually understand that she isn’t supposed to pull at them.

Standing up, holding on to my hands, is another favourite pastime. Sometimes, when she’s feeling adventurous, she even takes a few steps. But for some reason hands are the only thing that she uses for support when pulling herself up. Once she is standing, she can let go of my hands in order to grab hold of a chair or my knee, but not before. The farthest she’ll go with just furniture is onto her knees, not to standing.

She hasn’t fallen at all when standing – when she gets tired or loses her balance, she lands on her cloth-nappy-padded bottom. She doesn’t fall forward because there’s always something there to hold on to. She’s more likely to hurt herself crawling, actually – not only when crawling off beds but also when she simply slips on the floor.

The first tooth is halfway out and the second one is already visible and on its way.

The teeth are not exactly useful for eating yet so her food is still mashed and pureed. But lumpy purees are more and more OK: she used to filter them out, swallow the rest and push any lumps out with her tongue. Now she mashes the lumps with her gums. And she is quite happy to eat real pieces of banana. I’d have thought that finger foods would be fun for her by now but she cannot pick things up between thumb and index finger yet, only with a full hand grip, and that makes it hard to actually put small things in her mouth. So I’m still putting all the food in her mouth, one way or another.

On the other hand, she has totally understood how sippy cups work: you grab the handles and pull the cup towards you and put the spout in your mouth and tilt the cup, and then you suck lots of water in your mouth and spit it out in a well-controlled, tight, beautifully curved spurt that soaks everything.

The noises she make are getting more and more differentiated and she is, I think, getting to the point where she purposefully makes different noises in different situations. Nowhere near “emme” yet, but close to being conscious communication. (While crying is communication, it generally seems like an instinctive thing, whereas words seem more conscious.)