Our kiddo is growing and changing every day. I probably say this every month, but I'm really loving the age she is right now. She's all full of smiles and laughter and it's getting easier to get her to do both. She is also getting to a good place with tolerating being out, so we're starting to worry less about taking her shopping or out to eat, because she's usually pretty good about it as long as we don't leave her strapped in too long. She's a lot of fun.
Allie has definitely mastered the army crawl now and can get around quite well this way, even though she's not doing a full on regular crawl. She does get up on her hands and knees, but she doesn't usually get mobile that way, she's usually on her forearms when she crawls. In any case, she's definitely moving a lot, so close supervision is key now.
Allie is also sitting very well now. We still keep a close eye on her though because without warning she'll occasionally fall over, but usually she'll sit for a while without a problem, and she likes to go from sitting to army crawling if she sees something she's after.
Allie is eating about two "meals" a day now. Daycare feeds her oatmeal cereal with water in the mornings on the days she is there, and then we do some kind of puree in the evening at dinner time. I was open to the idea of Baby Led Weaning, but Allie didn't seem to get it at first. Recently though, I did give her a spear of cucumber with the skin still on and she did pretty well gumming it and getting all but the skin ingested. I think she likes the idea of it, but we also need to work on a food she likes the flavor of, because sometimes she seems turned off by cucumber. We'll have to try some other things. Allie really likes being fed with a spoon though, so in terms of actual food consumption, we've had pretty good success with spoon feeding and purees. I've been making more things for her like butternut squash, yellow squash, peaches, etc...
Allie has had apples, peaches, pears, avocado, prunes, sweet potato, banana, acorn squash, butternut squash, peas, zucchini, yellow squash, and cucumber. She has liked most things, some more than others. Zucchini was the only big miss so far (she had a funny look on her face, like "WTF"), but I'll try it again. One thing I'm noticing is that she's not too happy if other people eat in front of her and she's not getting fed, so usually we have to feed her something at a meal time if we're eating. I think soon we can try some proteins with her, like beans, meat, cheese, and yogurt but I need to do more research on this. For those of you with babies, when did you introduce those?
Breastfeeding is still going well. I'm still pumping at work three or four times a day and feed Allie two or three times on weekdays (usually once or twice in the mornings depending on how early she gets up and once at bedtime) and all her milk meals on the weekends (about 6 times a day). I definitely pay a ton of attention to my water intake and consumption of food to make sure I can produce enough milk for Allie, but overall it's going well.
As for water, Allie also love drinking out of a glass and reaches for mine whenever she sees me drinking. It's funny. She gets a lot of water on her shirt in the process, but loves trying. We've tried some sippy cups and she's got a ways to go with those too. She does best with one that she has that has a spout in the middle and is most like a bottle.
Sleep. Well, right at about six months we decided it was time to get Allie out of the sleep suit. It actually seemed like her sleep was kind of getting worse because of her being restricted in it, and also she was close to being able to roll over in it, which is one reason you basically HAVE to get them out of it. So finally one night I bit the bullet and put her to sleep in a onesie, sleeper, and a Halo sleep sack, which is the method the sleep suit people suggest you use to transition a baby out of the suit, since they still feel the buffer of the layers of clothing. We only did the onesie layer for about a week and from then on have just put her in a sleeper and the sleep sack, which we're still doing. Overall, the transition went well, probably better than I expected. She immediately was up less than she had been in the suit for the first couple nights. She even started sleeping close to the whole night consistently. The only thing was that for a lot of this month she did this thing where'd she would sleep from about 8pm til about 4-5am, and wake up and I usually had to feed her and then SHE would go back to sleep, but it was too close to my wake time (6am) on week days for me to go back to sleep. This week she had several nights where she made it the whole night through, but she is still kind of hit or miss on wake up time, anywhere from 5am to like 7am, so it's pretty hard to predict. One note- we did have to go up to size 3 diapers at night because she's going so long without waking up and getting changed and leaked through some size 2 nighttime ones a bunch of times. The 3s are working well so far.
Allie and I went to Hilton Head for labor day weekend, and she did great in the pool and beach again.
When at the beach we saw tons of little kids that are about a year older than Allie and it made me wonder how she's going to be next summer when we are there. Mind boggling...
Allie also tried out the swings for the first time recently. SO CUTE!
Allie has become super interested in Clyde in the past couple weeks. When she sees him she smiles at him and if you play fetch with Clyde in front of her, she laughs hysterically. It's hilarious.
Stats:
I think Allie is close to 16 lbs according to my scale, but she could be a little less since it's hard to figure out ounces. I feel like she's probably going to chunk up a little more now that she's eating solids more.
She's kind of in between size 2 and 3 diapers. She's still wearing 2s during the day, but 3s at night and I think we're on our last box of 2s because I think we can pretty much put her in 3s all the time now.
Clothes are kind of all over the place. She can be anywhere from a 3M to a 6-9 month depending on the brand. She pretty much fits into anything 6M well though.
I am doing pretty good. Being a working mom is tough, and I struggle with the same stuff I'm sure all working moms struggle with. There are not enough hours in the day and many week days I feel like I do not have nearly enough time to get everything done. It's hard, but I still think it's the right thing for us.
Allie is doing great at daycare and moves to the next room/age group this week. I admit, I am a little teary to see her leave her first daycare room. I really felt comfortable with the teachers in there and never worried about her. I'm sure the new room will be great too. It's crazy to see her moving up and growing up so quick.
I'm going to try to do a day in the life of a working mom post soon, and also should do a 7 month favorite things post since it's been a while since I've done one, and we have a lot of favorite baby things to update you guys on. Both of these have been on my mind for a while, but finding the time to blog about them is... difficult!
I love this kid more than I can put into words... I'm so lucky to be her mom :)
