River is 8 months old!
-He weighs 17.5 lbs according to our digital scale when he’s naked (25th percentile).
-He is about 30 inches (99th percentile).
-He wears 12 month sleepers (I literally never put him in anything but a fleece sleeper).
-His hair is light blonde and his eyes are blue, but a greyish dark blue. Not a clear blue.
-He has his two bottom teeth, one top tooth, and the other top tooth is cutting through the gums as we speak. So 3.5 teeth?
-He is still exclusively breastfed. No solids or bottles. We try giving him solids but he hates them. They make him angry. He will happily chew on anything inedible, but if it has a flavour it’s game over.
-He will suck water out of a washcloth in the tub, but if it comes out of a sippy cup he will open his mouth to let it fall back out. Breast milk from the boob. That’s it.
-He nurses every 1.5-2 hours during the day. Sometimes shorter.
-He's very distractable while nursing. We have to be somewhere quiet, otherwise he pops off to look around. No people or TV.
-Unless we catch him at the perfect time, he’s pretty uncooperative with getting his diaper changed. He wants to roll onto his belly every time he’s laying on his back.
-He poops more frequently than he used to. It’s several times a week now - every 2-3 days. Sometimes he gets into a heavy poop cycle, where he’ll have like 8 big poops in 2 days, and then nothing at all for several days.
-He wears Flip diaper covers on the middle rise with prefolds (Indian cotton and Thirsties hemp prefolds).
-At night he wears a sloomb medium OBF with a Geffen Quick Absorber and a Disana wool cover.
-He has two or three naps a day. Last week I was sure he was going to be consistently taking 2 naps a day by 8 months, but then the last three days it’s had to be 3 naps again. So we’re in the transition. It just depends on what time he wakes up and how long his first nap is. He can handle the 3 hour awake periods just fine, but 4 is too long for him.
-He sleeps 10-11 hours at night total.
-He has awake periods of about 2.5-3 hours.
-I still wear him for all of his naps, with loud white noise.
-He actually seems to like to be worn now (sometimes, anyway). He doesn’t like it as much as Isaiah did, though.
-We are cosleeping and nursing overnight.
-Night time usually has 2-4 wake ups now, which is a LOT better than before. Sometimes I nurse him at every wake up, but not always. It depends on how he’s acting. Sometimes he’ll go back to sleep easily without it.
-He sometimes nurses to sleep. Maybe 1-2 times a week. The rest of the time he nurses and then pops off and I lay him down and he goes to sleep just fine with me laying beside him. I’m actually very impressed with this. He does really well. Almost never cries.
-He is a tummy sleeper and has been since about 2 weeks old.
-He is cross crawling on his hands and knees full time now. That started a week ago.
-He pulls up to stand on everything and almost never falls anymore.
-He is cruising along furniture pretty proficiently.
-He can climb stairs no problem. He cannot go back down them. He can’t get down off of any elevated surface the proper way (feet first) even though we’ve shown him multiple times a day since he became mobile at 4.5 months.
-He started clapping a week ago. He started crawling on his hands and knees full time, so we were cheering for him. Eventually he would crawl a few feet, then sit up and clap for himself with a giant smile on his face.
-He smiles SUPER easily.
-He seems to like other people fine as long as they don’t want to hold him. He is getting better about this though, as long as you let him warm up to you first.
-He is a HUGE mama’s boy. He can only tolerate being away from me for so long before there’s nothing anyone can do, he’ll just cry and cry and not stop until he’s with me again. It’s still very pronounced but there have been some improvements in the past month.
-He is still extremely drooly.
-He puts everything in his mouth. He always has to be chewing or licking something. Even if it’s just the floor. It’s shocking that he doesn’t like solids.
-He still doesn’t take a soother, just chews on it.
-He’s always laying his head down on things. Pillows, blankets, the couch, the floor. It’s so noticeable with him because he never stops moving. It’s really sweet to watch.
-We’ve barely used his doorway jumper this month. Maybe twice? He has less tolerance for it now. We’ll probably take it down soon.
-We put his play mat away right after he turned 7 months because he hadn’t used it in ages.
-He hasn’t gone in his exersaucer in over a month, but he enjoys cruising along the outside of it.
-He DESPISES the car again. He went through a phase where he was fine for 5-10 minutes in the car. But a couple of weeks ago he started screaming the second he gets put in the car seat. I switched him to a convertible seat (a Radian, nice and roomy). I knew it wouldn’t help, and it didn’t. But it’s easier to get him in and out of than the bucket seat.
I think that’s everything! This month has been a lot better than last month! Thank goodness. He is becoming slightly more independent (I would not classify him as “independent” under any circumstances, though).
