8 Months Old

Wow. I'll say what I say every month...I cannot believe she's eight months old. I thought time would slow down when she hit 6 months, but it hasn't, sadly. While I'm looking forward to a lot of things as she gets older, I know she's only going to be my little baby for such a short time and am trying to cherish these moments.

I'll try to get a weight on her soon. I'm guessing she's a little shy of 18 pounds. I think she was about 17 pounds around 7 months and she seems to be gaining about a pound a month.

Baby girl is just now starting to wear 6-9 month size clothes. She is still wearing most of her 3-6 month stuff, but since there are some 6-9 month clothes that are definitely for winter, I want her to get some use out of them, especially now that spring is officially here (although you wouldn't know it with the snow we had last Thursday night!).

We're getting ready to transition her into size 3 diapers. She could keep wearing size 2 for a bit longer, but they're starting to get pretty tight. She's still wearing a size 3 diaper overnight to help contain her overnight pee.

She's crawling EVERYWHERE. She's into everything!!! She can crawl really quickly and it is still incredibly cute to watch.

She loves to pull up on everything including, as of Friday, her crib. Imagine our surprise when we went to get her after a nap and she was standing there looking at us! Her favorite thing to pull up on, though, is her mommy. Whenever I'm on the floor with her she's crawling over to me and trying to climb up Mount Mommy.

Her favorite "toys" are plastic bags, computer cords, paper (coupons, newspaper, mail), and socks. She loves socks, unless they're on her feet!

Her favorite actual toys are her activity table and all stuffed animals, especially her sock monkey. She hasn't established a real connection to any one toy, though, which is okay with us!

Baby girl loves to grab faces. We try to allow her to explore, but she ends up being pretty rough. Both her daddy and I have quite a few scratches all over our faces. She'll grab at eyes, eyebrows, noses, and lips. She also loves to grab ahold of mommy's hair. Usually, though, she has ulterior motives when she grabs hair--she's trying to pull in for a kiss. One could probably argue that she's not actually giving a kiss, but we like to believe she is! She opens her mouth wide and drools on and licks our faces. It's the sweetest thing! Last week she even chased down her mostly immobile friend (my friend's son who is 3 weeks younger) and grabbed his head and gave him kisses. One of these days we'll be using that as blackmail!!!

Sleeping still isn't wonderful, but it's been a lot better this past week (except over the weekend). She's only been up once a night, eats, then goes back to sleep. Daddy is able to work his magic and put her down awake and she falls sleep on her own. We still rock and sing to her until she's sleeping, but she can sometimes lay down awake and soothe herself to sleep. It all depends on the quality of her naps.

To date, baby girl has eaten: green beans, peas, carrots, sweet potatoes, buttercup squash, applesauce, pears, peaches, banana (although not much), and avocado (bad news--she hated it!). She would LOVE to eat mommy and daddy's food. When we're eating something while holding her, she'll try to shove her nose into our mouths to smell what we're eating. Tonight she did it with a peanut butter cup with Daddy. One morning it was even with my toast!

Speaking of eating...we're still waiting on that tooth. She's been chewing on everything in sight for about 5 months now and still has no teeth. I'm not sure how excited I am about the experience of teething, but it would be nice to be able to give her tastes of our table food.