Okay, so I guess these monthly progress updates on Toren are becoming more of retrospectives since I don't get around to blogging until near the end of the Month. Nine months has been an exciting age for Toren since he had his first flight, started sleeping through the night, has finally started some real crawling, has agreed to finally start feeding himself, and has entered a fun mimicking stage. He also got his first ER trip out of the way.

At the beginning of the month Toren and I flew down to Gainesville for a week to visit P-paw and Memaw. Toren did pretty good on the flight and had relatively little fussing. He was still a bit of a handful considering he's not one to sit still on a lap these days. After twisting and turning for about 2 hrs he finally fell asleep for the last 20 minutes of the flight. My arms were pretty sore the next day. We had a great visit with my parents and even my brother was there from Pennsylvania. This was the first time in about 4 years we had all been together (my brother is a chef so he never gets the holidays off) so it was a pretty special trip. My brother treated us to a lot of wonderful gourmet meals. We also took a trip down to the Naples area to visit with my grandparents as well as a cousin and her three wonderfully sweet boys. Toren also surprised me by deciding it was finally time to start sleeping thru the night while we were down there. Though he also became a bit more demanding during the day since he entered into the kind of mobile, but not really mobile stage of things, where nothing keeps his attention for more than 10 mins. On the flight back my brother flew with us and got a connecting flight from Detroit to PA. It was great to have an extra pair of hands.

Toren has also finally decided to start helping out with feeding time and has become better coordinated with feeding himself finger food (well something other than just mom and dad's pickle spears when eating out). It probably helped that I finally bought him a real highchair (well a travel one anyway) with tray so that he could get some extra practice in. He's still happy to have us feed him baby food but at least he's willing to do some of the feeding himself now. He also started doing some real crawling last week to celebrate St. Patty's day. He's still more comfortable with " swimming on the floor especially when on our linoleum and hardwood, but he's making progress. Toren also likes to mimic sounds now and will often respond to "Hi" with a similar sound. He also likes to have lengthier conversations with us or Dexter. He and Dexter are becoming better friends these days especially since Toren will now hand food off to him.

The not so fun part of this month was our trip to the ER for a MRSA (staph) infection. Toren's buttock became infected last week with what I initially thought was just an infected pimple, when a large portion became infected, Justin took him into the pediatrician. The pediatrician drained the infected site and prescribed us some antibiotics, but also suggested that we take him to the ER to get IV antibiotics. Well I think it was a bit of an over reaction on our doctors part as the ER folks were a bit surprised that we came in given the fact we hadn't tried any antibiotics yet and Toren didn't have a fever and was acting fine. Five hours later we got to go home with a new prescription of antibiotics (they thought the one that our doc prescribed was a bit overkill) and with out any iv antibiotics. Toren was a champ though and charmed everyone as long as they didn't touch his infected site. He even took a nap for part of the time so I was able to get some work done (thank goodness for free wireless at the UofM ER). His infection is almost gone now so we're all pretty happy about that. Hopefully that is the last of that type of excitement for awhile.

P.S. - Toren reminded me last night at 2:30 that he also is teething again and has at least two additional teeth (#4 & 5) coming in. Guess his vampire looking days are over since he is finally getting at least one of the front two teeth.