Biting, bonking, babbling, and baby gates: Fiona at 7 months

A lot has been going on for Fiona since our last post. For instance, all that biting finally paid off, and she cut her first teeth, as she shows off here. The first top tooth broke through yesterday, so you can expect to see those top teeth in next month's post.

She has also abandoned the army crawl and is now a crawling pro as she shows off on the left, where she is playing "Find Mama". Her avid crawling has stimulated a flurry of baby gate installation, as Jeff demonstrates to the right.

Fiona is loathe to sit still these days, so it was tricky to get her to sit still for her 7 month old portrait. Here was one pretty reasonable shot. We had to prevent her from climbing off the chair head-first several times, which relates to the other theme of the month: bonking. She's been doing a lot of head and face bonking as she learns to keep her balance while navigating her world. Just this morning she raised our hair by climbing up the two stairs out of the living room. Yikes!

She's compelled to pull up to stand on whatever is available: chairs, tables, Mom or Dad, laundry baskets, and her favorite: her little stool, as shown here. She makes a beeline for it every morning. The sharp corners make us nervous, given her "bonking" tendency, so we're trying to teach her the phrase "be careful".

Grandpa Cooney was in town for a quick visit & we all went out to a farm nearby to pick pumpkins. Turns out that it was the first pumpkin patch visit for all of us! Fiona was pretty tired, but she seemed to enjoy the visit. Here she is hanging out with some pumpkins. Although it's not pictured here, Jeff found the very biggest pumpkin in the patch to take home...

Finally, Fiona has been babbling up a storm, which you can see in a video posted here.The first thing she started saying was actually "Blah, blah, blah", which cracked up us. Here's photo where she's babbling  AND standing, two of her favorite things to do.