Nine Months: Thriving (No Matter What They Say)

Anneliese is nine months old today!  I have to say, she finally doesn't feel like our new baby anymore. About time, right?

She just seems so much older and more independent now than she did a month ago.  Like she's finally losing some of that new-baby helplessness.  I think this could partly be due to so many of her firsts over the last few weeks:
- first night without Mommy (and it was a whole weekend!)
- sitting up without help
- clapping her hands
- shaking her head no
- waving at people
- trying to feed herself finger foods (without much success, but still)
- kissing us
- turning the pages of board books
- riding in a big car seat
- riding in the front of the grocery cart
- giving up that third nap (for good, we think)

I'm so excited as I watch her become increasingly more interactive with people around her, and as I see her personality really start to emerge.  But in truth I am also feeling a tad bit distracted, even discouraged, by her physical growth.  Does this look familiar? 

In case you're curious, growth charts are not supposed to look like this.  But apparently my children have a knack for it.  With two months of weight loss, and three (three!) standard deviations fallen on her chart, we officially have another failure to thrive (FTT) baby on our hands.

For the record, we're not nearly as worried about Anneliese as we were Nathan, and there are currently no medical interventions planned -- this time around, there will be no hospitalizations, no physical therapy, and no buttinski social workers.  Like her brother before her, it seems to be a phase where her metabolism is just way ahead of what she's eating.  The solution?  Eat more. 

But the problem is that keeping an upset baby in a high chair when she doesn't really want to eat any more causes a rush of dark emotions to come flooding back to me.  The calorie-counting, the panicky can't let baby skip a meal! feeling, the prayers during nursings to stay latched on just one more minute, one more ounce... it's an ugly place if I let my brain go there. I remember all too clearly the day I got fed up and just decided to be done with it with Nathan.  It was so freeing.  But I'm having trouble re-capturing that freedom right now.

A slower growth curve I could just take in stride, but the fact that Anneliese is losing weight is troubling enough to distract me from all the ways she is developing well.  For instance:  All organs seem to be functioning correctly.  She sees and hears well.  Her cognitive development is on par or even a little ahead.  Our doctor said yesterday that she's one of the most social nine-month olds he's ever seen.  Her height and head are growing normally.  She sleeps well.  Her fine motor skills are, for lack of a better word, fine. She's happy.  And I don't want to let worrying cause me to lose sight of that.

Praise the Lord for our beautiful amazing nine-month old!  Any of you who have seen her in recent weeks can attest to the fact that she is, everywhere except that stupid chart, thriving.