8 month stats

Lana turned 8 months old last Friday, and this has definitely been one of her best months yet. Why, you ask…

SHE SLEEPS NOW!!!!!

I gave that its own line because I can NOT stress enough how significant this fact is. You may recall from her 7 month post how I lamented the dire state into which her nighttime sleeping had fallen. Waking 2, sometimes 3, times a night, with nursing often being the only thing that would get her back to sleep. I was seriously about to lose my mind. Again.

Well at that sick checkup she had the day after her 7 month birthday, I told her pediatrician about this and she was really surprised. I was happy that she found it odd too, and I wasn’t just being a crazy sleep-deprived mother. So we decided to wean Lana off breast milk and nursing all together and switch to formula. I was very ready to be done breastfeeding this time anyway, so I was totally fine with this plan of action.

It worked. Plain and simple, I’m convinced this is why she now sleeps as well as she does. It took about a week to get her drinking all formula and no breast milk, which was much faster than I thought it would be. I was very hopeful she’d be fully weaned by the time we undertook our massive road trip to Colorado almost 2 weeks ago now, and she beat that time frame by a mile.

So now at bedtime she takes a 7-8 oz. bottle, gets a good burp out, I have her give everyone a goodnight “kiss”, then I put her to bed in her crib awake with her big green monkey. She rolls over, puts her little thumb in her mouth, hugs her monkey tight, and that’s that for the night. Sometimes she’ll cry out a little as I’m putting her down, but that usually subsides within just a few minutes. I keep a night light on for her, and for 2 solid weeks now she hasn’t awoken once to eat in the middle of the night. In fact, I’ve only had to actually get her out of her crib one time in that span to calm her, and it was almost dawn so I just put her in bed with me and she went right back to sleep.

This is a HUGE breakthrough! We’re finally getting some sleep, and within the past couple days I’ve even stopped making a small bottle to keep in the fridge overnight just in case she wakes. The putting her to bed awake too is new, which I started when we switched to formula. Having to bounce her to sleep in my arms for a good hour every night after her bedtime nursing, then worrying that she would wake up when I put her in her crib was getting mind-blowingly annoying.

I hope I’m not jinxing us by putting this out into the universe, but I think we now have a baby girl who sleeps through the night!! If you have any confetti and noisemakers, please feel free to throw it and use them at this point in the story.

Her naps are still good, as they have been for awhile. Most days consist of a morning, afternoon, and evening nap, unless I’m at work. Then it’s usually just an afternoon and evening nap. There’s just way too much going on in the kids room to doze. She’s got stuff to see!

So other than sleeping, let’s see here… She’s now up to 2 full meals of solids daily, lunch and dinner. We’ve been out of cereal for awhile, so right now it’s all fruits and veggies, but I just got a tub of steel cut oats to make her some more oatmeal. So far I’ve made her oatmeal, sweet potatoes, peas, carrots, pears, and bananas, and she’s had a couple other fruits and veggies in store-bought baby food when we were traveling. She also gets whole milk yogurt and applesauce. I was going to do apples too, then remembered from making them for Della that the time and effort required to bake, peel, and sufficiently mash up apples results in one simple thing – applesauce. Buy it. Just get the all-natural kind without high fructose corn syrup. She’s seemed to love everything to this point, too, which is great. I give her a little water from a bottle after each meal. Then she takes 3-4 bottles of formula each day, depending on what time she gets up in the morning.

She’s more active than ever, and no, I no longer leave her unattended on top of anything. She has added to her army crawl of a few weeks ago, and now gets completely up on all fours and rocks back and forth. I’ve been saying it for weeks now, but she really is about to crawl any day. And I have a feeling standing then walking will not be far behind. Just today at work the girls said they left Lana sitting in her highchair after lunch because she’s so fast moving around the room. Yes, yes she is. This is a girl on the move!

Blowing raspberries is her new favorite thing. I know I mentioned she did that last month, but it is now in full effect. Throughout our entire road trip the past week and a half we heard endless strings of baby spit coming from the backseat. It’s rather hysterical, because you simply can’t help but smile.

She also likes to play monkey-see monkey-do with her big sister. The girls sit next to each other at meals, and the other week I heard Lana imitating Della’s coughs. D would cough, then L would look over, watch her, smile, and do her own little fake cough. These 2 crack me up. Most of the time.

She has 2 teeth now, right in the middle of her bottom row. I thought I saw the very tip of the top right one poking through on her 8 month birthday, but I haven’t been able to get a good enough look to confirm or refute that. Every time I try to lift her lip to get a good look the little dragon squirms away. We’ll find out for sure soon enough.

Definitely able to sit now. She still doesn’t get up into a sitting position from her stomach or back yet, but if you sit her down she’ll stay there for a long time now. She can also pull herself back to a sitting position if she starts leaning in one direction or another. Her favorite move is to tip forward into “crawl” mode from a sitting position and take off across the room after a toy, Della, a bug, whatever happens to catch her eye.

Umm, I think that’s about it. The posterity stats – size 3 diapers and size 4 overnights (in Seventh Generation. other brands she can still fit into size 2 and size 3 overnights); mostly sizes 9-12 months for clothes, although a few 6 month things still fit; and we’ve been done with drool bibs for awhile. Her official growth stats will come next month after her 9 month well check.

I probably say it every month, but she really does get more and more fun every day. Especially now that I’m regaining sanity from actually getting some sleep! My little blue-eyed beauty.

And finally, the Della/Lana 8 month comparison…