Tag: M month-by-month

Seriously? I can’t even believe how late I am for this post, and that’s saying something, seeing how I haven’t been “on time” for a post in about 4 years. Morrison turned 15 months old almost 2 months ago! In all fairness, we didn’t have his 15-month well check until he was almost 16 months old, but still! That was nearly an entire month ago. Ah well, here I am now.

Here are his official 15 month stats:

• Weight: 26 lbs. 2 oz. (86%)
• Height: 33″ (92%)
• Head: 49 cm (93%)
• BMI: 17 (68%)

This one. He just keeps getting better and better. And I feel like such a monster even saying this, but I make a daily pact with myself to not get mad at him for no apparent reason. Because I found myself doing that. A lot. And I hated it. He didn’t deserve it; he just always happened to be in the way of something I was doing at that particular moment and really wanted to get done, but being his mama is what I really want to be doing. So I made myself stop being so selfish around him and remember that he and his sisters are what truly count. My time with them will never come back, and I needed to stop being rotten and love them better. So I am.

He smiles. He laughs. He hugs. He kisses. He snuggles. He runs. He chases. He helps. He plays. He creates. He does. He is. He amazes. He shines. He lives. He loves.

It is so fun watching him grow up as this little tiny man. Obviously being 100% used to raising little girls, seeing this one come barreling through life is pretty spectacular. For as crazy and silly as he can be, he honestly listens to you and gives the best snuggles imaginable. He grabs my arms and neck in bear hugs that melt my heart into a giant puddle that fills my entire soul and being. And he now does this thing where I swear he’s pretending to eat my face. Probably because I am constantly nuzzling and kissing his entire head. I just can’t get enough.

I cannot tell you how many people have said, “Oh, a little boy. Just you wait!” Or “Get ready for boys!” And I really can’t stand it. He is being raised no differently or given any different attention simply because he’s a boy instead of a girl. And I honestly haven’t seen a whole lot of difference in the genders so far activity-wise, attitude-wise, whatever-wise. You’ve met Lana, right? Ok. Enough said.

He still loves his plug (pacifier) more than life itself, which I have been unable to rectify so far, but when his face isn’t plugged up he’s actually quite the little chatterbox. Here’s a list of some of his current favorite “words”:

• Bucky (buh-buh)
• Excuse me (kind of a “coo muh” sound)
• Ding-dong (dih-daw)
• Pumpkin (puh-puh)
• Lana (ya-ya)
• TV (dee-dee)
• Please (mee with the sign for please)
• Baby (ba-buh)
• Football (very similar to Bucky, buh-buh)
• Elmo (bah-bo)
• Cookie (as in Cookie Monster – dee-dee)
• Banana (na-nuh)
• Choo-choo
• Goldfish (go-go)
• Nigh-night
• Poop (poo; and he likes to point to his diaper and nod his head when I ask him if he’s pooped in his pants)
• Knock-knock (while knocking on a door)
• Giving his cute little sideways grin when I tell him to do his “crinky” face
• And of course he’s been saying Mama for a long time, usually screamed at the top of his lungs
• Singing – whenever we start singing, especially “Happy Birthday,” he actually starts singing along with us. Not with words, but with tone. It’s so cute!

For the posterity stats, he’s in size 12-18 month clothes, but that’s soon to be pretty much all 18 months when I rotate his dresser and put in all the cold-weather clothing. Size 6 or 7 shoes. Size 5 diapers, both daytime and nighttime. And since we’re out of comparison photos, here is Della’s 15 month post (Lana didn’t have an update until 18 months, so stay tuned!).

My little lovebug.

Morrison turned 1 year old on May 31, so this post is extraordinarily late. However, I just realized the other day that we didn’t even have his 12-month well check until June 15, then I forgot to get the sheet from his doctor with all his stats on it so have been waiting to receive that in the mail, so I didn’t even have all the info I wanted to put in here anyway to write it earlier. So there, I feel better about that now.

Here are his official 12 month stats:

• Height: 31.5″ (93%)
• Weight: 23 lbs. 5 oz (76%)
• Head: 47 cm (72%)

There honestly isn’t a whole lot of new stuff to report since his 11 month post (including the posterity stats and sizes), so I’ll just fill this one with pictures. His walking is great, he now loves to scream with excitement (literally. he is so loud!), he transitioned to a little Thermos sippy cup for all of his milk except a bedtime bottle with ease, he’s enjoying playing outside in the summer weather just as much as his big sisters, and he is becoming more and more of a funny little person every day.

As a new twist, here’s a month-by-month look at this little guy’s first year. And then the usual Goonie trifecta, along with Della’s 1 year post and Lana’s 1 year post. Sorry for the really poor quality of these collages; I’m not sure why they’re so blurry this time.

Happy birthday, little one! I can’t believe you’ve been with us for over a full year now. We love you more and more each day!

Morrison turned 11 months old on April 30, so this post isn’t even 2 weeks late! Excellent.

I feel like I’ve said this for the past couple posts, but, overall, things are pretty much the same with this sweet little boy. He loves to talk and shout all over the house, he eats like nobody’s business, he’s still letting us sleep through the night, and he would crawl as fast as he could after his sisters to the ends of the earth.

His walking is slowly becoming more steady and preferred over crawling now, however. He still does love to drop down, put his head down, and crawl to get you as fast as he can, but he can now fully walk across rooms. And his cute little shuffling side step has given way to a full-on belly-first, forward-leaning, barreling walk. It’s adorable.

He loves to snuggle, and that is one of my most favorite things about him. He snuggles into my shoulder. He snuggles face-first into his rag. He snuggles into his sleep friends in his crib. He leans in to give head-first snuggles to people as hugs.

I seriously can’t believe he’s going to be 1 in just a few weeks. The days before him are still pretty vivid in my memory, but they seem like forever ago. So it’s a weird combo in my mind.

Here are the posterity stats, since we won’t have official numbers until next month: size 3 diapers, size 4 overnights (the size 5 overnights leaked, too, so we went back to 4s and they magically stopped leaking for some reason. odd), clothes are now mainly size 12-18. He still drinks 4 bottles of formula daily – wake-up, mid-morning, mid-afternoon, and bedtime – but we are on his last can of formula before switching over to whole milk. Hooray!! Naps are still 2 a day in the morning (half an hour to 2 hours, depending on the day) and afternoon (1-2 hours, depending on how long his morning one was), bedtime is at 7, and most nights he’ll sleep until 6-6:30. So that is amazing and magical compared to a few short months ago. Whew.

And the moment you always wait for, the Goonie trifecta comparison – Della, Lana, Morrison. Here, too, is Lana’s 11 month post, which again contains a link to Della’s 11 month post. Goonies abound!

Morrison turned 9 months old 2 weeks and 1 day ago. So this post isn’t that late, right?

We finally had his next well check that same week, so here are his official 9 month numbers:

• Height: 29.2″ (82%)
• Weight: 20 lbs. 3 oz. (59%)
• Head: 47 cm (94%)
• BMI: 17 kg/m2 (46%)

So although I keep thinking we have this huge baby, judging by his percentiles, we really don’t. Only 59% for weight, which seems so low to me. Ah well. The doctor said everything looked good, so I won’t question things.

He pulls himself up to stand on everything with ease, which leads me to believe walking will start happening sooner than later. He’s been standing for a while now, though, so who knows whether he’ll really walk soon or not. He crawls at the speed of light and has been known to totally destroy something in a matter of seconds when I turn my back. Nothing major, mind you, usually just knocking over a pile of magazines or pulling up half the letter and number mats the kids play on. And since I refuse to babyproof everything, he just hears “No,” “Morrison, stop that,” and “get down” a lot. He’ll learn. Surprisingly, he has already begun to obey those simple orders of where and where not to grab stuff.

Fortunately he loves to sit and play with his toys for good chunks of time, whether in his playpen or just out and about. And books! Oh, how he loves to “read” books, and Cookie Monster has become his particular favorite. We have this one Cookie Monster book that he grabs off the bookshelf in the girls’ room almost every time he goes in there. I finally pulled the basket of baby board books we have out of the corner of their room so it’s more accessible for him to dig through. He’ll put each of his toys in his mouth, apparently seeing which ones induce the best amount of slobber. You’ll often hear him chattering and “singing” to everything, too. Quite entertaining to watch that little head play and decide what to do next.

He is a fantastic eater. I just finished off his last round of premade and blended up oatmeal the other day, and I think from now on I won’t even need to make any baby food at all. He pretty much eats everything the girls do, except honey. For example, for lunch today he and Lana both had macaroni and cheese and pineapple. And last week when I took the girls to swim lessons one evening, Ryan said he ate an entire hot dog, a pickle, and a whole piece of string cheese for dinner. In tiny pieces, of course. He still gets 4 bottles of formula daily, and each one is 8 oz. (he usually drinks the whole thing) – 1 when he wakes up in the morning, 1 mid-morning, 1 mid-afternoon after his nap, and 1 at bedtime.

His naps are still solid. Almost every day he takes a morning nap, although he has been forgoing that on the walk to school for the past couple days. However, his afternoon nap is still usually reliable, lasting 2-3 hours. Evening naps have been gone for a while now.

And dear universe, please don’t curse me for saying this, but I think he finally figured out how to sleep through the night!! Wait, that needs more exclamation points. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

He slept through the entire night without waking even once for a quick pacifier plug the night before his 9 month birthday, and that was the first time he had slept the whole night in his life. And thankfully, since then, he has slept through I think almost every night. His cries for a pacifier are becoming fewer and farther between, which is great. When he does do it, all he needs is his pacifier and he literally falls over and goes right back to sleep, but that’s still a time that I have to wake up and do something out of bed. So when I don’t have to do that, I’m much happier. That whole lack of sleep thing, woof.

So there you have it. This little guy is quickly becoming one of the kids, as much as I’d love him to stay a baby forever. It’s almost hard for me to remember his very early infant days, which sounds ridiculous since they were so relatively recent. I think that being busier with my editing work, driving across the country within his first month, and feeling like life just went right back to normal after his birth kind of took away that magical “new baby” feeling, which seems unfair to him. But I’m trying to make up for that now, and he is a fun one to play along with, that’s for sure. You’ll never see more smiles and silly faces than on Morrison John Rau.

The posterity stats – clothes are almost all size 12 months, daytime diapers are size 3, overnight diapers are size 4. He has 8 teeth – 4 on the top and 4 on the bottom. Perfect for eating hot dogs. Here is Lana’s 9 month post for a comparison as well. And, as always, the trifecta of Goonies – Della, Lana, Morrison. I still see no resemblance among them whatsoever.

Morrison turns 9 months old in exactly 1 week, and of course I haven’t gotten a chance to even write his 8 month post yet. In my defense, however, I have actually been busy working. I had a book editing project that finished up the week before last, then last week I got a monster editing project from that same publishing company to help edit an encyclopedia. What?! I know. But anyway, here we are again, so let’s check this kid out at 8 months.

Unfortunately, I have no idea where our most recent pictures are, so you’re stuck with just his monthly shots this time. Great mother, eh? Not only am I 3 weeks late for a month-by-month update, but I don’t even have enough pictures to share. Poor kid. We have the next checkup for 9 months, too, so there are no official numbers either. Criminy!

But he’s cute, so here’s another 8 month pose.

He started crawling 1 week before 8 months, and now he’s all over the house. Fortunately he appears to be a fast learner and is starting to understand where he can and can’t go and what he can and can’t grab to shove in his mouth. At the end of last week he started pulling himself up to standing, too. Now he loves to hold onto the sides of his playpen or bed and bounce up and down. Little stinkpot.

He is still the best eater and loves to gobble down every meal we give him. Favorites include oatmeal and bananas or applesauce, sweet potatoes, avocados, yogurt, Cheerios, cheese, beans, and tiny pieces of the girls’ snacks. He gets 4 6-8 oz. bottles of formula a day, with all nursing ending just before 8 months and all breastmilk being used up right after 8 months.

Sleep is still hit or miss, but he has now gone multi-week stretches of sleeping through the night, which, for him, is from 7:00 to somewhere in the 5:00 morning hour. So not bad, especially if I actually go to bed anytime before 10:00. Last week, however, he started waking up again, but that was at the onset of the most horrific case of diaper rash he has ever had and that I might have ever seen. There are purely raw patches of skin on either side of his legs and buns right now, and he’s been pooping almost every diaper change. That obviously doesn’t help the cause. I finally got Triple Paste yesterday after using Aquafor, and it seems to be healing already. This may be due to teething, because I did see his next top tooth almost poking through at the end of last week, but it looks like it has receded. I sure hope this ends soon, though, because when he poops in the middle of the night it hurts him and he wakes up crying.

I think that’s about it for the big things this month. It’s hard to believe he’s almost as old as the time he spent in utero. In fact, he might be there already, since he was born 10 days early. I’ll have to calculate for sure.

Here is the monthly trifecta. Della, Lana, Morrison. Pretty much the cutest kids I’ve ever seen, but I’m obviously 100% biased. My heart is so full.