Natalie: Eight Months
December is always such a whirlwind month with Christmas. This month was so busy, but also full of fun things for this little bug! She’s been standing up every chance she gets. She loves crawling up to coffee tables and pulling herself up to see what’s on the table. We’ve been trying to be extra careful with small things like pieces of food or little toys. She’s also been trying to move herself along and will try standing against the ottoman to moving herself over about a foot to the couch. She definitely wants to walk!
Natalie took her first plane ride to Cleveland last week to celebrate her baptism and Christmas with my family. She did okay on the plane. She really wanted to get down and move around and spent a lot of the flights pushing off of me. Of course, she was also really tired. She fell asleep on me a few times, but they were all really short naps. Really though, she behaved pretty much like I expected her to so I can’t really complain! She loved meeting more family including her great-grandparents which was such a treat for me! The 3-hour time change is obviously throwing us off a bit. I tried to keep her on Pacific-time which worked pretty well.
I was a bit worried about our trip because all four of us had to sleep in one bedroom, but both girls surprised me for the most part. We had one night where Natalie woke up and realized we were right there in the room and was up for a bit after that, but other than that, she barely budged when we came in.
Generally speaking, she’s been sleeping pretty well. There was a week a few weeks ago where we’d put her in her crib and she’d keep standing up even though she was so exhausted. She has pretty short wake times, after about 2-3 hours, she starts to get pretty cranky and rubs her eyes. The bad thing about this is that she will go from being so happy to super angry in 3 seconds and has no in-between!
Eating is going well. Natale is just not that interested in purees. She likes some of the ones that have a bit of chunkiness to them, but she pretty much eats whatever we eat, just in small pieces. For breakfast, she eats some fruit, eggs, or I will cut up some waffles or pancakes for her. For lunch and dinner, it’s whatever we eat and I also try to give her some chunkier baby foods. She loves pasta and mac and cheese. She gets suppppperrrr mad if I take too long to put more food in her mouth. She’s certainly not like Maddie was when it comes to eating and I think that is a good thing because Maddie is 3 and still barely eats anything. She still only has two bottom teeth, but I suspect more are on the way because she’s been drooling quite a bit and she whines when I try to feel her gums.
We took the girls to meet Santa at Disneyland before our trip. Natalie was definitely not a fan, but they managed to get a few decent shots before she started crying!
She has been having more fun playing with toys, but her most favorite thing is still her big sister. Maddie makes her chase her all over the place and as soon as Natalie gets close to her, Maddie screams, and they both start laughing. It kills me and also makes me want ten more babies (okay, no, not really, who am I kidding?!)!
