Sofia, Eight Months

What I find even more amazing than the fact that Sofia is eight months old is that in four months she will be one. I think of how Lucas was at age one, walking everywhere, saying a few words, sitting on rocking chairs, and it seems unfathomable that this is just around the corner for his baby sister.

Fathomable or not, her accomplishments are coming rapidly and in a blur. I will try to organize them here as best I can.

PLAYTIME

With three months of crawling under her belt and an appetite for fun I have a lot of baby on my hands. I am SO thankful for the large finished room in our basement where she is able to crawl & cruise freely and chew on blocks, play dough accessories and anything her heart desires. She loves music and bounces up and down in glee whenever she hears it. Right now Lucas is constantly playing his new favorite song by Robert Cray (R&B, more B than R) about a woman who keeps trying to "pull the wool over his eyes so he's steppin' out." She squeals with delight when her brother plays a game of disappearing and then reappearing from another part of the room. And he loves it too, considering tricking people and hiding are his favorite things to do.

She is still very much a Mama's girl. She is outgoing and happy with others but usually prefers that I hold her if she has to choose someone. Most of the time, however, all 20+ pounds of her is scrambling to get onto the floor and into something she shouldn't be playing with. I have been guilty of letting her play with the dishwasher and even opening the fridge so that she can unorganize and organize the bottles in the door.

Two new past times are dropping things and putting things into a container. We are alike in this way - I too like to get rid of things and organize. The other day, she was playing with a small car and noticed the pumpkin was near her (for a couple of years now, Lucas has been using a Halloween pumpkin to carry his cars) so she dropped the car into the pumpkin over and over again. Drop, retrieve, drop, retrieve...

Lucas is playing better with her. Our rules are, don't mess with her when she is precariously balancing and don't squeeze her as hard as you want to.


TEETHING

She just got two additional top teeth for a total of six.


EATING

I'd guess she eats about 3-4 stage 2 size baby food jars of food per day. Mostly homemade things. Still nursing about five times a day/night.

She is mastering the pincer grasp. I'd say about seventy-five percent of what she picks up successfully enters her mouth. She likes soft carrots, eggs and O's best. Chris calls her the crawling choking hazard and that she is. When you mix speed, a good pincer grasp and the enjoyment of putting things like throat-sized rocks into her mouth it is never good.

For pureed food, she is still eating a lot of soups - chicken and lentil, primarily. I mix in something green (spinach or avocado) and occasionally something out of the norm, like beets. Our neighbors have a garden and she loved the butternut squash they gave us. Last night I ground up the pasta with meat sauce that we were eating and she seemed to enjoy it as she does most foods. We also do a fruit/yogurt/rice cereal combo adding just a bit of brown sugar and cinnamon if needed.

My rule is, if the taste makes me wince I'm not giving it to my baby.

She's just started using the "all done" sign and I LOVE IT! We didn't do too much of this with Lucas although he was not as big a fan of solid food and would have probably signed "all done" the moment his popka hit the high chair.


SLEEPING

We are moving towards sleeping through the night more frequently. But this often gets derailed by teething and growth spurts, physical and mental. A lot of this has been going on lately and she has been waking up once between midnight and two and again in the wee hours of the morning. She naps well two to three times a day. When she is going through many changes naps can be short (45 min - one hour) but usually she has at least one 1.5 - 2 hr nap.

At night she has a lot of excitement to wind down from and she has finally succumbed to being massaged. She will sometimes lie completely limp in my arms and let me rub her baby muscles until she becomes quite drowsy. Nothing better than a sleepy baby.