Adventure Awaits: 8 months

Emma has changed so much over the past month! I think it has been her craziest month in terms of learning new things. Let's take a look back.

C'mon Mom, just let me stand!

I hate laying here so still.

Emma is just now growing into her 9 month clothes. The 6 month pants were just getting way to short! I'm not sure of her height/weight right now.

CRAWLING- Emma has made so much progress in her crawling skills. She can fly across the room now if she wants to. I used to be able to run to the kitchen and back and she wouldn't get very far, but now I can leave her by her toy box and she ends up across the room. She loves to crawl after me when I leave the room and she is so happy to be able to get where she wants to go. This means she gets into trouble more! She loves to crawl up to the TV stand which has pointy corners, so we have to constantly pick her up and reset her somewhere else. I love to watch her crawl to me when I ask her if she wants to eat. It's adorable how excited she gets!

EATING- She continues to eat whatever we give her! There are no foods she outright spits out, but we do have to coax her with the green vegetables and chicken by mixing it with rice/milk. We did discover that she has some sort of banana intolerance. After giving her a real banana 2 times and letting her squish it all around and get it all over her arms and belly, she broke out into a rash the next day. She never threw up, so I don't think it is an allergy but the pediatrician couldn't test her to find out. My gut feeling says it is more of a skin reaction than an allergy because of where it was touching her skin, but we won't know until next time we try it maybe in a few months. We are still spoon feeding her mostly baby foods, and she eats finger food snacks such as Mum Mums, puffs, lil crunchies, wagon wheels, and yogurt melts (which she didn't like!). She scrapes them up off the tray with her whole hand rather than using her fingers, so we are still working on that pincer skill. As far as nursing goes, she is still going strong but is SUCH a distracted eater. Dan can't even sit on the couch at night during her last feeding because she just wants to stare at him. She is just one curious little babe.

Prunes...haha! She actually LOVED them.

GAMES- I think she is really starting to learn things this month. For example, she starts giggling in anticipation when I am about to chase her or tickle her. Or when I count "1 2 3" and then let go of her hands to stand up, she knows I am about to let go. I don't feel like she understood that type of thing before this month. It's exciting to watch her learn!

LAUGHING- The funniest thing to Emma right now is when she touches Dad and he gives a big reaction like he was just punched. Or when he "hits" himself and throws his head backwards with a loud reaction. She CRACKS up! It's too cute.

PULLING TO A STAND- Emma officially learned how to pull to a stand this month! Now I definitely wasn't ready for that. It seemed like all of a sudden she learned how to pull up in the crib and then was pulling up on her toy box, the couch, us, and now anything and everything such as the oven, the dishwasher, and the wall. Haha! She uses her leg muscles rather than having to hang on to something now. It's pretty impressive if you ask me! We can also let go of her and she can stand on her own for about 5 seconds sometimes- mostly just 1 second before she loses her balance. She is getting braver as she stands and will grab a toy and let go of whatever she is holding onto and then either grabs it again or falls down. She just gets right back up though! She is basically standing 70% of the time now, it seems. Emma can bend down and pick up a toy and stand back up, and she will bend her knees to squat rather than just falling down. This may not seem like a big deal but it is a learned skill and developed muscle so it's great!

Here are all the places Emma has figured out how to pull to a stand. Yes, even the wall.

SLEEP- Emma is doing a great job of going to sleep on her own for nap time now!! I love that I can just lay her down in the crib, zip up her sleep sack, turn on the piano music and fan, and leave the room. She normally is out within 10 minutes for the first nap. She loves to have 1 binky in her mouth, and another one to play with. This helps her fall asleep like a charm. For her 2nd nap, she goes down on her own like 90% of the time. Sleep training was so hard but so worth it now. We stuck by her side for the first couple weeks and then I was able to start leaving for 5-10 minutes before going in and laying her down again. Just this week she started taking naps over 1.5 hours whereas before it was always 30 minutes. Great success and improvement this month! Just today she woke up during her nap, sat up in the crib twice, and went back to sleep. That is a first!

For night time, she will not go to sleep on her own. Isn't that odd? We gave up on crying it out/checking on her every 3 minutes when we realized that wasn't working for 2 weeks of consistency. Now, we are rocking her until she is mostly asleep and then laying her down and patting her back. At least its not a 2 hour process/battle now. She has started sleeping 8+ hours a night sometimes too which was not happening last month. Just last night, she did 10 hours! Sadly, she is going to lose her crib and curtains soon, so sleep is probably going to be rough during the move.

STRANGERS- I think she is warming up slowly to strangers again. Now, she just kind of checks them out and stares them down instead of getting upset. She doesn't really willingly smile at them though. Not yet at least!

TALKING- Emma normally is a pretty quiet girl, but for the past 2 weeks she has started babbling more, saying "mamama" and some "ba's". Our next goal is "dada!"

TICKLISH- Her ticklish spots: feet, thighs, armpits. So cute!

TEETH- Our baby has officially grown 2 teeth! The bottom 2 started poking through right after she turned 7 months. It's been almost a month now, and I think they are still coming in. I never realized it was such a long process! She never really seemed to be extra fussy, or if she was, I always blamed it on the sleep issues. So maybe she really has been teething for the past 4 months. Does anyone ever really know? She is starting to use the teeth to bite off pieces of her Mum Mums and she used them once to scrape some little shreds off my slice of apple. The downside to her new teeth was the chewing on the crib! Yuck! I walked in one day and there was paint around her mouth and a nice little chewed section, so I immediately bought some covers for each side. Since Amazon takes 10 days to ship here, we had to improvise quickly. I tied sheets/pillowcases on the crib and that worked well while we waited. Tacky? Yes. Effective? Yes!

WALKING- No, she isn't taking steps by herself but she loves to hold our hands and walk all over the house.

Here are some pictures from the month. She was playing on the playmat for the first few weeks. It doesn't interest her anymore.