9 Months Old

Where has our tiny little newborn gone?? I can't believe he has been out as long as he was in! He just keeps growing and growing into the most darling little boy. He has always been a sweet, content little baby, and he just continues to be a joy to be around.
He has the funniest little sense of humor, and makes funny little jokes in his own way. He also understands when we're being silly, and he'll laugh at just about anything. He loves to turn his head to the side and lean waaaay over until we copy him, and then he sits up really fast and laughs and laughs.
He loves to feed himself now and particularly loves spinach & kale puffs, grapes, blueberries, bananas, crackers, and oven fries as finger foods. He'll eat and love just about any fruit or vegetable we give him. Beets, carrots, zucchini, broccoli, spinach, peas, nectarines, pears, green beans, everything! I still can't get him to like oatmeal or any other type of cereal. I think he hates the mushy texture.
He is crawling faster than we can keep up with now. He loves to get into any type of cords and we are constantly trying to pry electrical plugs out of his hands. He still loooooves sock monkey and has now started to go to sleep with one hand hanging onto monkey's leg or tail. And when he wakes up he'll sit and talk and laugh with him for twenty or thirty minutes if we let him.
Mason also loves his books. He put them on the bottom of the bookshelf in the living room so he can get to them himself, and it's the first thing he does in the morning when I bring him downstairs. He pulls all of them off the shelf and then sits and reads. His favorite is Hello, Bugs and his Tractor book.
He loves to Skype. Whenever he sees the laptop open he starts smiling and chatting and looking for someone on the screen. And the other day he was in the kitchen when I started to call my family in California. He heard the "beep beep" that it does and he started crawling into the living room full speed, practically hyperventilating. He loves his family!
He now has four teeth, and numbers five and six are about to break through at any moment! He definitely uses those teeth too. He loves to give big slobbery baby kisses, but now they are usually followed by a big bite out of your cheek.
He can pull himself up on just about anything and loves to be standing. He can walk along furniture and can stand for a few seconds without support. Whenever he is around bigger kids that can walk he just stares longingly and enviously. He is just dying to do it!
The weather has been gorgeous here lately, in the high 60's, so we've been going outside for walks and in the backyard to play. It might be my favorite thing in the world to watch him get excited about all the things around us when we're out. He'll hear a dog bark far away or a bird chirping in the tree or just leaves blowing in the wind and he just has the most amazed look on his face. His big wide eyes remind me how magical the world really is. I'm so grateful to have a little child teach me how to be excited about those things all over again.

Now for the pictures and videos. We finally got decent phones so we've been using those to take all the pictures and videos lately, so I'm going to have to figure out how to put them up. So I'll post this now and add them all this afternoon. =)