BABY WINTER’S MONTHLY UPDATE: 8 months old
Again, I am posting late this month (considering she’s nearly 9 months old), but all of this was written and the stats are as of June 10, 2014!
Baby’s Age: 8 months old
Height: 27 inches
Weight: 17 lbs 14 oz
Head: Not sure
Diaper Size: Size 3
Clothes Size: 9 months
Here is a look back at the past few months:
Here is Winter in her Bumbo:
June 10, 2014 – Our theme this month: NO SLEEP! Those glorious sleep days are OVER. I’ll explain in a minute…
Can you tell that I am a busy mom with an 8 month old to take care of 24/7?? The fact that I keep getting around to posting Winter’s monthly updates late is just a taste of how little time I have for things these days. Especially blogging! 🙂 I made a goal to continue with monthly updates on Winter until she is 12 months old, so I’ll bust out a few more months. I know that when Winter is grown, I will look back and appreciate the time I took to write monthly updates on her during her first year of life.
Winter is growing, growing, growing! Between 7 and 8 months, she has grown an inch (by my amateur measuring skills, that is). It’s amazing to see the difference in how much “taller” she looks. She not only looks longer, but her body is thinning out a little. Don’t get me wrong, she is still PLENTY chubby, she is just not as roly poly as she was before! Right before she turned 8 months, we finally put away her 6 month clothes and moved into the 9 month outfits. I notice I hold out as long as possible to keep her in smaller sized outfits because I hate saying goodbye to her clothes! Poor thing was stuffed into some of her 6 month clothes like a stuffed sausage!
I have been swearing that we have a teething baby on our hands. Everything has been pointing to it! But I am still seeing no “true” evidence of it. She has been very cranky and fussy. I am looking forward to seeing something actually pop through at some point.
As I have written about every month, Winter has been a champion sleeper. She started sleeping through the night at 9 weeks old, as has consistently been a fabulous sleeper (usually 12 hours at night). That is, UNTIL THIS MONTH! Over Memorial weekend (she was about 7.5 months old), we said “so long” to those beautiful sleeping patterns. Her nighttime sleep and daytime nap routines went out the window! For 3 weeks straight, Winter was waking up 2-3 times every night. Not just once, but TWO TO THREE times!!!! That is very, very hard on parents who have been spoiled by a baby who sleeps like a rock for 12 hours. VERY hard. Not only did her nighttime change drastically, she also didn’t want to take very good naps during the daytime. She would only sleep for short periods, or sometimes not at all. She was cranky, fussy and making mommy feel completely exhausted. Thank goodness, we seem to have passed the worst of it. As I said, she was doing that for 3 weeks straight, but she seems to be tapering off—she’s now only waking once per night and she’s back to doing two 2-hour naps per day.
She isn’t crawling yet, but she is very close to it. She gets up on her hands and knees and rocks. She can transition from sitting to moving into a crawl position. It took her a little while to master that maneuver. She would often get “stuck” on her leg. But now she has skillfully mastered the technique. Part of me thinks the reason she hasn’t started crawling yet is because she can successfully roll everywhere she needs to go. She just rolls and rolls and rolls. 🙂 We know that once she begins crawling, our lives will drastically change, so I am in no utter hurry to see her crawl just yet.
Winter is very expressive. She loves to wave her arms around and clap when she gets very excited about something. Her little feet and hands are always moving–usually in a circular motion. Constantly. She also makes the most hysterical facial expressions! She loves to scrunch up her nose a lot.
We got to see several family members recently. At the end of May we took a trip to Hermosa Beach, CA to visit my brother Paul. While there, we also go to visit Eric’s great aunt and uncle and cousin. We had so much fun there! We also had Eric’s parents here in Colorado for several days the first week of June.
Milestones: She is clapping, nearly crawling, is trying to pull herself up on things, and stands against a object.
Sleep: As I mentioned, we have experienced a rough month of sleep. We really hit a low! We seem to be somewhat getting back on track, as Winter is only waking up approximately once per night instead of 2-3 times. She usually goes down around 8pm, wakes to eat anywhere from 12am-5am, and then wakes up for the day around 7 or 8am. She is back to napping pretty well again. Her morning nap is 2 hours and her afternoon nap is 2 hours. The afternoon nap used to be consistently 3 hours, but oh well!
Best Moment: Getting to spend several days with her Grandma and Grandpa Lute! She adores her grandparents. We had a great time when they came to Colorado to visit. We also had a wonderful time seeing Uncle Paul (my brother) in California.
Worst Moment: There have been a lot of bad moments this past month. Lots of crying, screaming and overall fussy baby…..
Health: She is healthy and I believe she is teething.
Eating: Breastfeeding is still going well! She eats 5-6 times during the day, and lately 1-3 times during the night. We are eating at around 7-8am, 11-12pm, 2-3pm, 5-6pm and 7:30-8pm (plus any night time wakings). She is eating 2 meals of solids (morning and evening usually). She begs for EVERYTHING we eat, so I often feed her tiny pieces of whatever I’m eating (grapes, broccoli, chicken, peaches, banana, watermelon, etc).
Likes: Standing up, playing with her feet, the pets, swimming, eating my food, and jumping.
Dislikes: She dislikes getting her diaper changed lately.
How Mommy is doing: I am doing well. But I’ll be honest…this lack of sleep is KILLING us. I mean, we are so exhausted all of the time. We are doing so many things trial and error to try to get her back to sleeping well. I know that it’s just a phase and she will eventually get back to sleeping through the night. But it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel (especially because as I’m posting this blog, it’s been 6 weeks since she has slept through the night, and that’s a long time!).
It probably doesn’t help that we are going through the stressful process of selling our house and house hunting to buy a new one. That is a full time job right there!! The good news is that our house received multiple offers within a weekend and we got under contract quickly. Now the hard part is finding the right house to buy. We need a bigger house, bigger yard, etc. I know we will find it!! It’s just stressful and very time consuming to go through this process.
As far as “post partum” goes, I am feeling great! I haven’t had time to do a post-baby body update in a while. I’ve been maintaining my 40 pound weight loss for the past several months. Breastfeeding is really allowing me to eat whatever I like without much consequence. I love that! I still exercise 5 times per week (mostly running and some weight lifting too). I am registered to run my next half marathon in October, but haven’t begun officially training for it yet.
***Also, I apologize if I have been less than stellar at responding to comments! I love and appreciate all of your comments, and do plan to eventually write back!! So sorry that I am not very good at all of this blogging stuff now! 🙂
If you missed her previous updates, you can check out:
Photos of Winter and Our Family:
Baby Lute x3 