Anthony at Nine Months

Caught in the act. Anthony climbs on a box to get to the remote controls.

Anthony had his official checkup on Tuesday (and I haven’t been able to finish this post until today)  and the official stats are in. He’s now 26 pounds and 9 ounces. And he’s 28 and 3/4 inches long… more or less, he was pretty wiggly when the doctor tried to stretch him out. He’s gained a couple of pounds and maybe a couple of inches. Still at about 90th percentile in weight and 70th for height. Not a small child. But I already knew that.

Anthony in the fireplace.

Dom says he thinks I’m the thinnest I’ve been since Bella was born. I have no way of verifying that because our scale battery died right before Anthony was born and I haven’t got round to replacing it. Still, I did a little rough math recently trying to figure out how many calories a day Anthony might be consuming. Somehow I had it stuck in my head that for a breastfeeding baby one only needed to consume perhaps an extra 300 calories a day. I have no idea where I got that figure from. Some book, I suppose. But then it occurred to me that there was no way that Anthony at about 25 pounds was only consuming 300 calories a day. I decided to find a better figure. I looked around and the estimates I saw were for a mean of about 50 calories a day per pound and it could vary from as little as 35 calories to as much as 75 calories per pound. But if we went with the 50 calories per pound that would mean that Anthony was consuming 1250 calories a day. Given that until the past few weeks when he’s grown much more interested in trying various solids about 90% of his intake was breastmilk, that means I’ve been burning calories like mad. No wonder the sweets don’t seem to be sticking! I don’t feel slim by any means, but I haven’t been very good at keeping my hands off the chocolate and cookies and the like. Of course the ideal would still be to get those extra calories from better foods, but still… 

Anthony makes a grab for the Christmas tree.

Anyway, enough about how his eating has effected my diet, this was a blog post about Anthony.

In addition to crawling like crazy from one room to the next, especially the mad dash to the bathroom the second he hears the door open, Anthony has also has figured out how to climb. I’ve had to rescue him from the inside of the fireplace (non-functional, mostly used for storage of toys) and from the top of the kitchen step stool. Also, he climbed onto a box left in front of the television.

The good news is that he’s much more self-sufficient and able to entertain himself for longer periods of time without needing me to hold him. The bad news is that he is into everything, pulling books off of shelves and ripping the covers apart and shredding pages—in one week he destroyed five library books—dragging the clothes out of his sister’s and brother’s bins, the lids and utensil out of the kitchen drawers, dumping the toys out of baskets and onto the floor. He’s always into the television wires and now he’s absolutely entranced with the Christmas tree. I’m constantly having to push things away from the edge of the dining room table because his little hands love to grab things off. Especially the cups of milk that Sophie, Bella, and Ben leave right where he can reach them. I am not doing such a good job keeping him away from all the things he’s not supposed to eat before he’s one. Cow’s milk, peanut butter, honey…. he grabs them away from his siblings plates or picks up scraps off the floor.

He’s still a pretty jolly little guy. Even tempered and friendly. He still reacts very little to getting an injection. Just a second or so of fussing and then he was back to smiling and playing with the stethoscope hanging on the wall and wrinkling the paper on the exam table. None of the other kids has been nearly so blase about shots.

He’s developed his own sign for food. He makes the finger open and shut sign for milk but holds his hand up high in the air, like an elementary school child begging a teacher to call on him. This isn’t really when he wants to nurse (that’s when he bites at whatever part of me he can reach) but when he wants a solid food.

Anthony pulls the table over his head. It was standing down below where his feet are. The basket was on top of the table.

Yesterday my sister and I composed a little rhyme:

Anthony Ignatius is really quite tenacious
Our house is not quite spacious enough for Anthony Ignatius.