Weekly Update

Sorry everyone! Late again, but that's life with an 8 month old, right?



















We are teething again! We only officially got to four teeth, and now she's working on SIX! The two teeth on either side of her top teeth are coming in. Her gums are white and swollen and she's eating like she's teething again (two ounces from the bottle at a time every fifteen minutes or so until it's gone, fine during the day...). She also is enjoying grinding her teeth. It drives me crazy. The sound of her grinding her little teeth together actually sends shivers down my spine (think fingernails on a chalkboard, yeah, like that) and it makes me cringe. I'm not sure what to do about this. Thankfully she's hopelessly smitten with her binky, so I just offer her one when she starts grinding away and so far it seems to work.

The crawling and pulling up are going well. She is getting so fast. She has a few things that she really likes: the power cord on my computer, the entertainment center and of course all those fantastic buttons, the stainless steel trashcan and the fireplace (ours is very close to the floor). The minute she hits the floor she's headed to one of those four places (or occassionally, the cat food bowl if it gets left out). She's keeping me on my toes trying to guess where she's headed and find something to distract her. I can't tell if she's really understanding me, but I tell her "no" and sometimes she looks at me and then actually leaves what she was doing. She seems to know what I'm saying, but I'm not certain yet.

She's pulling up on everything. I almost always find her standing in her crib. She's not yet really figured out how to get down from standing though. She'll stand in her crib when I put her down for her nap and then cry when she's ready for me to come in and rescue her. I don't think that she's quite gotten to the point where she's just crying to get me to come back in the room, since she does usually lay down and go to sleep after I pull her off the side of the crib once, but we'll see if that changes. When I get her up from her nap she scrambles to the side of the crib and uses it to stand right up and giggles. It's very cute. It seems like at every stage I keep thinking, "I just LOVE this age." So far, it's just getting better and better (I'll let you know if that still holds true when she's 13...).

And to add in something that I find a bit bizarre, she rolls her tongue to the side. She does it almost all the time and always to the right (which is funny, since I can roll mine to the left but not the right). I'm not sure why I find it so strange that she figured this out but it's really cute.

I have been worrying about her eating. She's getting on towards 9 months and I'm supposed to be transitioning her to eating more solids and fewer ounces of formula. Sweet baby L loves her solids, but I think I'm not doing a great job of offering them to her. Currently she has one meal a day that is fruit and plain whole milk yogurt, and then another meal that is a vegetable and oatmeal mixed with formula. I need to just add one more meal. I'm trying to transition her in to eating whatever we have for dinner, but with her bedtime schedule and our dinner schedule it's been really hard to get those things in order. I do think that she would really enjoy it, so that's my goal for this week. I'll let you know how it goes.

The weather has been great and the windows have been open. I think this photo is really cute. Sweet baby L crawled right up to the window where James had been all day (where I thought that she was going to attack him, as is her usual thing) and just joined him in staring out the window for awhile. I think that he was as surprised as I was!




















Have a great week!