You are now 7 Months Old.
WOW!!!
I know I say it every time I write one of these posts, but where did the time go?! Seriously?!
Let's take a look at how you're getting on at 7 Months...
Eating & Sleeping
You are now well into Stage 2 of Weaning.
We moved onto Stage 2 a few weeks ago, a little early but you were ready - you absolutely LOVE your food. So far, you are not a fussy eater all - there is nothing that you don't like so far, you devour everything we give to you and seem to really enjoy it.I'm really pleased about this!
We try to give you very varied tastes - I make sure that if you had something plain like meat and vegetables one day, the next day you have something a little more adventurous to keep you interested!
We still mostly use pouches as Daddy & I tend to eat very spicy foods that you can't have yet - but whenever we do have a meal that's suitable for you, you get that - this week for example you've had my Beef stew and my Spaghetti Bolognese. But to be honest - you don't seem to like them any more or any less than the pouches so at the moment I'm not worried about you developing a taste for anything in particular!
I get very excited about buying foods for you as I love seeing you eat different things and want you to always have new things to try - yesterday I found a mild chicken curry and a sweet & sour chicken with rice, so I'm looking forward to you trying those!
Your bottles are something that you're still fussy with though - you enjoy your morning bottle and your last one of an evening, but you tend to only take a few ounces in between them. So we're planning to move on to follow on milk from next week.
As for sleeping - well, we're still firmly in the No Routine club!!
A lot of people seem to think this somehow strange or wrong, but it works for us.
I have never been a fan of routine, particularly for very young babies, and I never wanted to be somebody who was governed by a routine - I like flexibility.
The only thing we do have a routine with is eating - you have breakfast around 10.30, lunch at 1 and dinner at 6.30.
There is no sleep routine.
At the moment you wake up anywhere between 9-10 am most days, and you go to sleep anywhere between 9pm-11pm most nights.
Your naps are whenever you feel like taking them, for however long you want to sleep. I've never woken you from a nap on purpose, or stopped you from taking one.
I think that because Daddy & I are up until gone 2 am every night anyway, it doesn't matter to us if you're up until 11 - we still get plenty of time while you're in bed before we go to sleep, and we like your company - we're in no hurry to see you off to bed!!
Hopefully you'll start to go down earlier naturally over time, but right now you're only 7 months old - you have nowhere that you need to be in the mornings, you can nap whenever you're tired, you're a very happy little chappy who hardly ever cries so you don't give us any difficult tiredness-related grumpiness.... so it really doesn't matter!!
No routine works for us at the moment.
Reading back through your 6 month update you were waking a lot in the night, I'm pleased to say that you're not anymore - every now and then you might want a little dream feed around 5 am, but most of the time you sleep through from whenever you go down until 9.00/10.00 am.
Your Life At 7 Months
You are known to everybody now as the Happiest little baby ever!! You literally never cry or moan. You always have a smile for everybody that you see, and are just all-round pleasant!
You used to have a little crying session around bedtime each night but you don't anymore.
You are such a little character and have already started to become very cheeky!
You have learnt to shake your head "No" and you do it ALL THE TIME!!! No matter what we say to you, you shake your head No!!
It is very amusing!
You seem to always know what we're talking about, and you love to sit with us and get involved in our conversations by shouting random sounds and babbling.
You LOVE to play rough, and be thrown around as much as possible!
You still love your jumperoo, and you enjoy sitting up to play now too - and you seem to like tummy time a lot more now, you don't complain about being on your tummy anymore.
You are still teething but we don't have any teeth through yet.
You're not crawling yet, instead you're doing a lot of "ground swimming" as we call it.....
You are still giving kisses on request but your new thing is cuddles - when we ask you for cuddles, you lean in to us with a hand on either side of our heads and put your head on ours.
Another really lovely thing you have started to do is pull people in for a hug! You do this if somebody (me for example) is holding you and somebody else (Such as Daddy) stands next to us....you keep one arm around my shoulder and reach your other arm out to pull Daddy in, you put your arm around each of us and hug tight....we call it a "family cuddle!"
You did the same thing this week when Nanny had hold of you and Gagand came to stand by you - you pulled them both in for a group hug too! So cute and its something you've come up with all on your own that nobody taught you!
What You Can Do Now
*Sit up unaided*Shake your head no*Hold your own bottle*Retrieve your own dummy when it falls and put it back in your mouth*Wave bye-bye - this is a new one and is in its early days, but its definitely there!*Roll in any direction*Make Gagaga and Nanana sounds*Give kisses when we ask for them*Give cuddles when we ask for them*Put your hand on ours to "dance" when we ask you to
*Pull funny faces!
Well I think thats all of our news for this month!
Lots Of Love,