9 month milestones?

[Justaworriedmum]

DD just turned 9 months, has just started to crawl and is starting to try and climb up on furniture. She babbles a lot - very chatty and copies sounds I make like dadada and mamama.

She will respond to her name 50% of the time so not convinced she does know it yet, or just recognises my voice?

She doesn’t play games with me yet… has started laughing at peekaboo but doesn’t do it herself. She can turn the pages of a book but doesn’t really know how to use cause / effect toys. She can put the pop up things on a toy down but can’t press the buttons to pop them back up if that makes sense.

She also flaps her hands which I’m not sure is waving but others have said it is?

Does this all sound like she’s on track? My friends child who’s a week older is so much more advanced, can almost walk and responds to everything, waving, clapping, playing etc so maybe I’m comparing her to an advanced baby but it’s hard to not worry.

Every baby is different.
She sounds on track to me.
My baby is similar age and doing the same stuff, a friends son is a day younger and he is not crawling at all. They all get there in the end.

She sounds fine to me, but if you want an overview of her development, this is the questionnaire most health visitors use: https://www.oxfordpediatric.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/asq9.pdf

Do check the scoring sheet at the back, as they never expect six 'yeses' in a section for 'development appears on track'. A section or two in the grey is also very common, just depending on what baby has happened to be focusing on, and usually resolves itself.

Sounds very normal and on track to me. They are all very different. It's best not to compare your baby to others too much.

I had three babies, and all were no more alike than chalk and cheese. That included with what some would call their milestones. To be honest, I doubt that some of them should even be called milestones because not every baby does all of them by any stretch of the imagination.

Two of my three were bum-shufflers and never crawled. Like many bum-shufflers, they walked very late (23 months and 21 months) and were still within the margins of normality. If I had listened to everyone else though it would have sounded like they were missing milestone after milestone and it was a disaster. They weren't and it wasn't.

If you are worried consult your Health Visitor but it really does sound pretty normal from what you have written.