14 Months

My little booger is 14 months old today.

He is the best little boy in the world.  He is an absolute joy to be around.  Just ask his daycare teachers!  I will be the first to admit babies are not necessarily my thing.  Toddlers on the other hand are awesome!  Jeff and I both agree that if we could have a baby born around 9 or 10 months, that would be ideal.  They sleep through the night, they interact more, and they don’t need constant attention.

Jake is independent, but definitely loves attention from his mama and daddy.  He plays well by himself but loves sharing with us.

He’s smart as a whip too!  He now knows the words shoe, book, blankie, head, and hand.  He will show you his belly on command.  He says “tan to” (thank you) when he gets and gives you something.  (You’re all pronouncing “tan to” in your heads right now, aren’t you?)

He knows exactly where we keep the animal crackers and will try to get one any time I go into the pantry, which is often especially at dinner time.  He likes to pick out his own from our super huge tub of them and prefers to have one for each hand.

His favorite foods are still mainly fruits and veggies, though he does eat more meat now.  His top picks are blueberries, grapes, and sweet potato.  He also loves mac and cheese, sloppy joe, and spaghetti & meatballs.  Typical kiddo.

Most of the time, he eats exactly what we eat.  Every so often if we have something with seafood in it or I think it will be too spicy for him, I give him something else, but that doesn’t happen often.  I do know he does not like spicy yet, but that’s to be expected.

He still does not like frozen things either in his mouth or on his body.  He bumps his head sometimes at daycare and they put a cold pack on him.  They always say he hates the ice pack more than the bump!

We’ve had a little…uh…frustration (for lack of a better word) with meal times lately.  He has this bad habit of trying to slam his body into the back of his high chair over and over again.  I asked people on Facebook what was going on with this and everyone said it’s normal, but I don’t like it.  I’m afraid he’s going to hit his head or hurt himself in some way.  Plus it’s not going away.  No matter how many times I tell him “no” he continues.

Speaking of “no”, he thinks that word is a game.  Whenever I tell him “no”, he just looks at me and grins the biggest, goofiest grin he has.  This, of course, makes me smile, which in turn confuses the heck out of him!  I try to keep a straight face, but the cutie pie is manipulative! 

Jake is a great sleeper, for the most part.  His most typical routine is to go to bed around 7:30p and sleep until 6:00a.  I wish he would go to bed a little later and wake a little later, but that’s just me being selfish.  He has to leave for daycare around 7:30a, so honestly the 6a wakeup time is actually pretty ideal.  It allows us time to play with him and get him ready at a leisurely pace instead of scrambling.  I leave for work at 7a, so if he slept much later, I wouldn’t see him for very long nor would I be able to help get him dressed.  Still, waking up at 5a so I can have a little quiet time gets tiring some days.

My little guy is seriously the best thing that’s ever happened to me.  I love playing with him.  I love watching him grow and learn.  He is getting so big so fast!  Every time he does something new I am amazed.  It’s awesome how their little brains soak up everything like a sponge.

Every month brings new, exciting changes.  Instead of getting nervous when I have to watch him by myself, I find I encourage Jeff to do things on his own now.  I have no problem watching Jake by myself for long stretches of time.  I know most of my SAHM friends are thinking “Yeah, I do this every day” but when you’re a working mama who has a retail schedule and aren’t home a lot of nights and weekends, being the sole person in charge can be daunting!

Jake is my little buddy now.  We go places and do things, he helps me with chores, and we play tons.  He’s the best friend a girl could have and I love every minute I’m with him.  If the years to come are anything like the past 14 months, we will be the luckiest parents on the planet!

Doesn’t hurt that he’s super cute too! (This is a new face that he makes all the time.  Love it so much!)

Eight Months

I know I say this every month but…where does the time go?  I know before I can blink I’ll be buying him stuff for his dorm room.  Oh, God, let’s not think about that…

So, I was supposed to have this post up on Wednesday.  I typically write my blog posts the day before and have them auto release early in the morning.  Well, instead of drafting my post on Tuesday, I played with Jake the entire day!  Many of you know how rare that is for me but for those who don’t…

I have a retail job and, while I actually do like my job, I don’t like the hours.  I work days, nights, weekends, holidays, you name it.  The nice thing about my schedule is that I get days off during the week.  More often than not, I go ahead and send Jake to day care since we have to pay for it anyway.  Then I’m able to get my list of chores done (read: cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, food prep, running errands, etc) more quickly and efficiently than if I were to have him with me.

When I’m with Jake, the whole world stops.  I try to focus 100% on him, playing, laughing, tickling, etc.  This is the main reason I take him to day care even if I’m off.  I want to be able to focus and get my stuff done so that when I do have him with me, I don’t have to worry about that.

Jeff has been doing a great job of pitching in lately.  So much so that I decided to *gasp* spend a whole day with my little guy!  It was fabulous.  We played in the morning, he took a 2.5 hour nap (from which I had to wake him!), went to a play date, went in to Mommy’s work, and then came home.  What a great day!

Long story short…I didn’t get my blog post written.  #sorryimnotsorry

So here it is.  Two days late.

But who’s counting?

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Jacob is eight months old.  Eight whole months.  He’s such a stinkin’ cute kid.  I feel like his last month or two have really been full of milestones!  Here are a couple new things we’ve learned to do in the last month:

He is completely sitting up by himself unsupported.  He’s alllllllllllmost able to pull himself to a sitting position.  Typically he rolls on his side and then tries to swing his torso around so it’s upright, but a lot of the time he just kind of clunks himself down.  Silly boy!

He’s had a ton of new foods!  His list of foods include broccoli, apples, peas (loves them!), green beans (blech!), banana, and peaches just to name a few.  I have pretty much stuck with purees, but he has recently shown an interest in puffs, so we’ve been practicing on those. He loves these pouches.  I unscrew the lid and just let him suck the contents out like a juice box.  He is actually really good at it!

I am going to start moving more towards the baby led weaning approach (where you give them bits of actual food and let them eat it), but I still get nervous every time.  He has gagged several times in the past with banana and the puffs, but hasn’t had an episode in a while.  I’m thinking he might possibly have figured out what he’s doing.

He can stand pretty well.  I like holding him up in front of me because I can easily hold him and hug him at the same time.  We use this table thing to help him stand.  He can hold on to it pretty well and it’s got pretty colors and lights on it to keep him interested.  Jeff said when he picked Jake up at daycare today, they were talking about how Jake can stand (assisted) really well and that he had been trying to pull up on things all day.  We think he’ll be standing on his own very soon.  Perhaps by his next birth month?

He is all about the crawling lately!  He started scooting on his front.  We called this the army crawl.  Then he started getting up on his hands and knees and just sort of bouncing or rocking back and forth.  Then one day, he figured out what to do and started crawling!  He still does a mix of the two, but it is so cute to watch.  One of his favorite things to crawl after is the camera.

Mommy doesn’t like that though.

He threatens us unless we give him lots and lots of yummy food.  The other day, he grabbed on to Jeff’s adam’s apple and I snapped this picture.  It’s grainy (thank you, iPhone) and sort of hard to see, but it’s cute.  Jeff’s face is priceless!

He is the happiest baby when we go in to get him from his nap or from sleeping overnight.  Speaking of that…he sleeps through the night!  He’s been doing it for a couple weeks now.  Every few nights, he wakes up crying, but I typically just put the monitor face down on the bed and try to tune him out.  Usually within 5-10 minutes, he’s back asleep.

It’s funny.  Just last month, I was contemplating calling the doctor to try and figure out why he wouldn’t sleep through the night.  Then I told myself to just be patient and see if maybe he’s just stubborn and he’d do it in his own time.  I was right!  Let’s hope he doesn’t revert…

He officially has two teeth!  In the Seven Month post, I said he was just starting to get teeth.  Now he has two beautiful pearly whites.  They are the bottom front two and they are so cute!  Of course I don’t have a picture of them.  You’ll have to make do with the cute one above!

He really is the happiest baby.  He gets fussy between 6-7:30p as I’m assuming many babies do as they are tired.  We were putting him down around 6p, but he was waking around 4a, so that was quickly changed.  Now we do our best to keep him up until at least 7:30p.  Sometimes he does great and stays up until 8 or 8:30p.  Other nights, he is so tired he’s practically asleep sitting up by 6:30p.  Those are the nights we pull out the big guns:  bathtime.

He has such a great time in the bath.  I have been putting on a swimsuit (yes, I know I could just get in naked, but for some reason I don’t feel comfortable doing that…call me crazy) and getting in with him.  It’s much easier to wash his hair if I’m able to be right in the middle of the action.

So anyhow, happy eight month birthday, Jacob!  You get playtime, I’ll take the Starbucks.  After all, they never miss a birthday!

 

Food for Baby

Even before I was pregnant, I knew I wanted to make my own baby food.  I wanted to control the quality of ingredients my little one ingested and I wanted to introduce herbs and spices at my discretion.

I was so excited to start Jake on solid foods.  Until he turned 6 months.  I don’t know why, but I started worrying about it.  Should I use purees or baby led weaning (giving them small pieces of cut up food they could self feed with)?  What should I give him first?  How often do I need to feed him solids?  What do I do if he starts choking or is allergic?  New moms are probably some of the most worrisome people on the planet.

I did TONS of research and talked to countless people about it.  My favorite resources turned out to be wholesomebabyfood.com and Carolyn, who works in the WIC office in Louisville.  I still find myself on the website and asking questions every few days, even after nearly two months of solid foods.

I feel like I’m a little behind in the whole scheme of things but Heather put it to me like this, “Food is just for fun until 1!”  I’m trying not to compare what I’m doing to what other moms like Brittany are doing (she gives her daughter full out meals each day and Hailey’s only a couple months older than Jake!), but it’s hard.

I decided to start with purees and see how things progressed.  We tried rice cereal first and Jake was just not sure of it.  We did the whole three day waiting thing and then introduced oatmeal.  He didn’t like either one!  So bland!

From there we moved on to sweet potato.  He definitely liked it better than grains!  He only ate a few bites at a time though, which is typical.

Bananas were next and they were a significant improvement over anything prior.  Is that surprising though?  Jeff loved bananas when he was little.  I think his mom told me they were his favorite food.  I still love bananas.  MMM.

Since then, we’ve tried green beans, avocado, peaches, apples, and prunes.

Want to know what his favorite food is so far?  PRUNES!  I don’t know why I’m surprised, but I am.  I ended up buying a couple pouches of the Plum Just Prunes and was planning on feeding him half of one.  After I gave him the half pouch, he was still doing the hungry-bird-open-mouthed-begging-for-more look, so I gave him the rest.  He gobbled them right down!

One day, I was feeling particularly brave and gave him some banana to chew on.  He did fine this time, but then a few weeks later, I did the same thing and he gagged.  Scared me half to death!

So, since then, I have kind of decided to put off finger foods until about 8 months, which is only a few weeks away.  I think I’m going to focus on introducing foods and once we’ve gotten further along, we can revisit the matter.

I’m assuming I will start figuring out what works best for me, as I have with every other thing in motherhood.  It just takes time.  Jake is healthy and happy.  That’s all that matters.  He gets a variety of foods and textures, which is expanding every day.  Soon we will start combining foods (like apples and bananas) and eventually introduce meats and dairy.

Right now, he hates green beans.  I have heard that you need to offer foods over and over again because, though baby didn’t like it the first time, it doesn’t mean he won’t later on.  I plan to give him roasted green beans next time.  I prefer them to steamed.  If he still doesn’t like them, I’ll mix a little apple or banana in to sweeten the deal.

Here are my questions: 
What has worked for you in the past?
What have you learned from giving your baby solids?
Is there anything you would do differently?
Do you feed your baby “meals” or just a bit of fruit or veggie?

I love hearing what other moms do.  I can’t wait to hear from you!