9 Months

I know this post is a bit late, but we couldn't get into the doctor until Monday and I wanted to include his stats. :)

So, at nine months we've past that milestone where he's been out longer than he was in and he has also surpassed the 20 lb. mark. I can't believe he's nine months old!!
21 pounds, 5 ounces--56th percentile
27 3/4 inches--25th percentile
head 19 inches--off the chart!

9 months has brought a pretty independent, mobile baby, who can be very very attached to his mommy. He screamed bloody murder and cried inconsolably when a stranger spoke to him at a restaurant last week. I had to resort to taking him outside to calm him down. When he's in a familiar environment, though, he is a happy go lucky kind of kid. He's lost all interest in nursing, and I've pretty much lost mine as well, so we're recently done with that. It's a little sad, but not as much as I though it would be. The timing was right for both of us, I guess! What a silly boy he is! He is totally mobile, except for the crawling FORWARD part... He gets in position, rocks back and forth, and even stands up on his tip toes just ready to go, then he moves back and plops back down on his bottom and sits, or crawls backwards. He can get anywhere crawling backwards and rolling and sitting himself up, and he even attempts to pull himself up onto things, but he just hasn't gone forward yet. It's so funny. He loves getting into things and I know we're just at the beginning of that. Once he does go forward, it's going to be madness, I'm sure! He has two adorable teeth now, the second being much worse than the first to come in. What a happy chump! We sure love having him around.




And now let's talk about this hair. Where do I begin? Sam was born with a small birthmark on the side of his head that was about the size of a dime. Nothing major and I honestly didn't even notice it much and knew that his hair would eventually cover it up, therefore being the perfect spot for a little angel kiss like that. And for the first month, I thought it wasn't going to grow hair out of it at all. It just didn't look like it would. Again, not a big deal since the other hair would cover it eventually anyways. But THEN, it was like one day he woke up and it had all this thick black hair shooting out of it like crazy (when he was about 4-6 weeks old or so). It was wild! And since then, it has grown about 10 times as fast as his other hair. We have made jokes about it (poor Sam!) and said that it was his tribal mark, marking him a member of the Thalgott Tribe, and other things. And it is something that people notice right off the bat when looking at him. And I wasn't sure if it was better to let it grow or cut it, I wasn't sure which would look funnier. So for a while I let it grow, but the last two months or so, it has gotten out of hand, to say the least! It hung clear down past his ear and just looked so funny. And perhaps you've noticed it in pictures, or noticed it in person. And maybe you haven't. So if you haven't noticed it, here are a few to give you an idea of what it looked like:


Pretty silly, huh? So we figured our options on what to do with it were: a) curl it in a ringlet like an Orthodox Jew, b) braid it, c) put beads in it and a feather and start calling him Sammy Spotted Head, d) keep letting it grow, or e) chop it off. Clearly, the only real option was to cut it and I was just hoping that it wouldn't look sillier cut off than it did growing out. And luckily, it does look much better now. Although it's only been a week and a half, it's already growing like crazy--I may have to cut it once a week, who knows! And this is probably the spot where he'll be bald or gray when he's like 20 or something. So here's the finished product:
I must say, he does look SO much better! And I was surprised by how different he looked with just that little minor haircut.