Liam @ 9 months

Liam is getting really good at crawling now. Sometimes when he's not going as fast as he wants, he'll push off his right foot, like in this picture, making him a bit lopsided, but it works.
He's also pulling up on everything he possibly can - especially my legs. Now that the weather is getting nicer, I'm not always wearing long pants, and he doesn't seem to realise that he can't just grab onto my calf skin like they were pyjama pants. It hurts :(

Watching him get down from standing up is hilarious - it's such a slow process - lowering, lowering, lowering - even if his bum is an inch off the floor - he doesn't realise, so he's still lowering, lowering lowering.

Sleeping has seemed to calm down somewhat - at least in terms of putting him to bed. I can put him to bed and wait until he falls asleep, but he will invariably wake up at about midnight and every couple hours after that :( But I can deal with it as long as he's not crying.

Liam's started to try and initiate interaction/conversation by looking at people and going 'Uh!' then waiting expectantly for a response. He does this a lot to his cousin Hamish and all Hamish can do is look at Liam in return with 'Dude, I'm 5 months old, what do you want from me?'

Liam's mastered waving goodbye - which is a sure crowd pleaser.

His favourite show on TV is a 5 minute show called Little Charley Bear. When it comes on, he sits down and goes 'Uh!' at the TV. I even caught him laughing and slapping his leg once. I think it's the lack of distracting backgrounds in that show.

He's been in a super good mood lately - hardly ever crying or whining at all. I think the increased mobility has made him less frustrated. He bursts into tears sometimes when he sees someone he's not familiar with, which always makes me feel terrible for the person, but I'm sure that's just a phase.

I also stopped feeding him cereal for breakfast - I'm beginning to wonder if he's not a bit intolerant to milk - his mood has seemed to get better since then, but it could be a coincidence. His poo is still sloppy/sticky, so I don't know what the deal is there :(

He spends his time at mother's group watching other kids play with toys and thinking 'oh, that looks interesting!' and crawling up and taking it off them to play with :( He's one of the better crawlers/sitters/standers in the group so it seems to have turned him into a bully. How long until I can actually teach him not to do that?

He still has only two teeth. He's beginning to use his index finger more and more - more now on my iPhone, instead of all his fingers, and when Adam reads him his book with the touchy/feely parts, he now recognises them and sticks his finger out to feel the soft/rough/shiny parts of the book.

Not so much with eating though - still palms all his food instead of holding it in his fingers, which means he doesn't really bite food off into chunks, just crams it all in his mouth. If it's too much, he'll pull some food back out of his mouth, and try again with his teeth. He's enjoying yoghurt now - there really isn't anything he doesn't like.