Nine months old today - you've come a long way, Baby

When I was a kid, the age of twenty seemed so grown-up. By twenty, I'd hoped to look like an Asian version of those women I saw in the television soap operas, and do lots of grown-up stuff. In my twenties, the age of thirty loomed as that magic threshold when I would no longer care what anyone thought of me; I'd be a super-confident superwoman. Needless to say, life has never turned out quite how I imagined it would.

When Baby was a teeny-tiny newborn, I expected she'd be sleeping for five hours at a time by three months.
When Baby was three months, I looked forward to when she turned six months and started to sleep just like the textbooks told me she would.
When Baby was six months, I read up on night-time sleep training methods in anticipation of starting once she turned nine months.

And now I realise that, at nine months, she is still a baby.

But on the other hand, so much has changed:
- We used to spend three or four hours each night trying to put Baby down for her bedtime. Now it takes half an hour to bathe, feed and sing to her and she's in bed by 6.30 at the latest.
- Baby used to just lie around on the floor and ignore her playgym in favour of staring at the ceiling. Now she's in training for the bum-shuffling Olympics and gets bored with a toy after five minutes. Though, strangely, she still finds unfamiliar ceilings fascinating.
- I used to sometimes feed her two-hourly. After a worrying phase in which she almost completely eschewed daytime feeds in favour of daytime looking and nighttime feeding, Baby is now a pretty good daytime solids-eater.
- Although she hasn't been weighed since she was five months old, I'm pretty certain that she's more doubled her weight since birth.
- Baby hated her first bath. Now she's a pro rubber-ducky player and third-time swim class attender.
- Every day I see more and more of us in her. She loves watching Baby Einstein (both of us); she sometimes has trouble getting to sleep (me); her favourite finger food is oven fries (both of us); she still looks like her dad; but her eyes are now brown (me); Baby prefers to spend most of her time on her arse (the boy); and watching computer games (also the boy); she eats tons of vegetables and fruit (me); and blows raspberries when she can't think of anything else to do (the boy).