8 Months & Counting!

Wow!  Has the time flown by!  Our little girl is 8 months old, and it feels like she was born yesterday, yet I'm already feeling like I need to plan her 1st birthday party.  It has been an amazing 8 months, where Lana continues to make us laugh, challenges us, and teaches us to enjoy the simple things in life.  

When my mom came to visit, she handed down my baby book where she filled out information about the day I was born, the visitors in the first few weeks, and the age I was when I experienced my "firsts", such as smiling, rolling over, sitting up, crawling, etc. She wrote several notes about my personality and interaction with Rachael, my older sister.  I read it after she left, and I cherished each word that she wrote, and I'm so thankful she took the time to jot down these little notes.  I thought I would be better at documenting this for Lana, but like I said, she kept us busy, and I feel like I've barely blinked my eyes and she is now 8 months old.  So, here's my attempt to get us caught up.

These pictures are so fun to take.  I can never predict how she is going to act and taking the pictures in the morning right after she is fed is key to the success.  It takes about 15 pictures in order to get 1 good one where there isn't something blurred from her moving around so much.  This 2 month photo is pretty funny.  :)

So, two months...  EAT, EAT, EAT!  Man, I'm not lying.  Breastfeeding is tough when your child wants to eat every 2 hours...or so I thought.  The more I Googled it, I learned that maybe she was just getting tired rather than hungry.  My parents still feel like I feel her way too often, and our babysitter thinks Lana is starving, but trust me, she is being fed the amount that she needs to be.  

I think Lana's first smile was closer to 5 weeks.  When Lana gets fussy, if you make her stand, she will almost always get over her bad mood.  And if she doesn't, then she is probably tired.  Life was so easy at this time because Lana still slept for most of the day.  I can't even remember what I did while she slept.  I would say that I miss that, but I always wanted Lana to be older so we could interact more.  Lana was always a good sleeper, though.  She slept in her own room at 6 weeks.  We would put her to bed around 9 PM, and I would have to get up around 3 AM, and then again around 7 AM.  Life was good!

3 months...  Anyone who meets Lana will say she's going to be a dancer one day because she never stops moving her legs!  I've had people in Aldi tell me this, people in Church, and her babysitter.  If she's anything like her parents, she won't be a dancer, but maybe a really good soccer player.  One thing is for sure, she never stops moving her legs.  She is constantly slamming them on the floor, swinging them around when she's being held out, or shaking them in her car seat.

Lana started rolling to her side right around 12 weeks.  She's never been one of those children that just rolls and rolls around the house.  Lana will roll over once to her stomach and play for a while, and then cry in order to roll back over.  Lana often slept on her side in her crib.  If she ever rolled over to her tummy during the night around this age, she would cry for us to in order to be turned back around.

4 months... Lana loved to "talk", hold her feet, blow bubbles, and roll over.  I went back to work at 12 weeks, and I, at first, hated every minute of it; however, I think Lana thoroughly enjoys going to the sitters and spending time with the other kids.  I think this is wear she picks up a lot of her new tricks.  Right around 4 months, we would be driving somewhere in the car, and Lana is just babbling in the back to herself.  It will be interesting to see if she ends up being a social butterfly!  We first tried not to teach Lana anything that develops extra drool, such as blowing bubbles, so she definitely got this from the kids at her sitters; however, I did learn that it helps develop their speech, so maybe it's okay.  We actually have been pretty lucky with Lana because she doesn't drool much.

At the 4 month appointment, the pediatrician said we could start giving Lana rice cereal.  It was fun to experiment with that.  We only fed her a little at dinner time until she was 6 months. 

At 5 months, Lana finally started enjoying laying on her stomach while she played with her toys.  She really started developing a laugh around this time, oh yeah, and a scream.  Those are fun.  And, she has started tracking the pets, and thinks they are so funny.  She laughs if they walk by her and look at her.  Abby still is hesitant around Lana, and Chase will lay down right in front of her and take it if Lana pulls on his fur some.

Lana was 6 months right after Christmas.  Christmas was so fun having her around!  She picked up sitting up right after Christmas and found her love for bouncing in her jumping seat.  I think everyone has seen enough of those videos to know how much she loves that thing.  She also starting putting a lot more of her toys in her mouth, which made me think she was teething, but she doesn't have any yet.  I also put on her board that she laughs at Dad.  Lana loves Greg.  Everything he does is funny to her.  If I try and do the same thing, she won't laugh for me, only for her daddy.  It melts my heart!

Right after Christmas when all the holidays and traveling were done for a while, we buckled down and wanted to get Lana on a schedule.  Her doctor said we could let her cry it out at 4 months and get her to sleep through the night, and we gave her 2 more months of night feedings and cuddles, so we were ready!  So, crying it out really wasn't that bad.  It took only 3 days, and she never cried for more than 30 - 45 minutes.  We have the night time routine down, and we're still working on naps, but I'd say we have definitely made progress.

 7 months...  Lana loves to eat veggies!  I was really excited to introduce food to Lana.  She loves food and as much as you will give her!  She will have her mouth gaping open waiting for the food to be shoveled in there.  I was really hoping for some funny faces as we tried new things, but no taste seems to surprise her.  We finally tried oranges and pineapples, and I think those made her eyes water some. 

Lana has starting moving around the house by her "army" crawling.  I looked this up on the internet, and they call this type of crawl, "creeping", where she doesn't quite get her belly off of the ground and uses her forearms and legs out to the side to get around.  

Bath times have also become fun for Lana.  She loves playing in the water.  At first Lana didn't care for baths when she was around a month old, but its gotten better ever since.  After I'm done washing her hair, she gets to sit up and play in the water.  She loves splashing around.

8 months! Lana loves to play peek-a-boo, try new foods, her Elmo toy, and she's getting into everything!  Lana will hold a towel over her face or a blanket and whip it down and look at you waiting for a reaction.  We always say, "Where's Lana?", and then she appears.  She was given an Elmo toy for Christmas from my Aunt, and it's actually for ages 2 and up, but you can put a different hat on Elmo and he will teach her different things from counting to sound recognition to following directions.  Elmo's mouth moves when he talks, and Lana thinks it's a riot.  She laughs out loud when Elmo speaks, and she will crawl across a room to get him.  I can't wait until she can understand what he is saying.

Meal time has become more fun now that Lana can try things off of our plates.  It's been hard keeping up with how much we can actually feed Lana.  I just looked at a guideline the other day and found that I was feeding Lana according to a 6 month old, so she needs twice as many solids now.  It's crazy that we are completely getting rid of bottles in 3 months.  Lana is starting to hold her own bottle now.

She is still army crawling but getting around just fine.  We've started baby proofing the house a bit.  She will crawl up to the drawers in the kitchen and open and close them.

So, it's taken me a month just to finish up this post and get it out and now Lana is less than a week away from turning 9 months old.  It's Spring now, and this warm weather has breathed new life into Greg and I, so we are getting excited about some projects around the house that I hope to post on here soon.