Isaac's 9th Month
Why is it that I always fall so far behind in blogging? Oh yeah, because I'm busy taking care of two active kids and I'm long winded :) Oh - and there was like 1000 (no exaggeration) pictures to weed through! Here's my attempt at a short 9 month update, since I have a lot of other things I need to post as well!
He got 1 more tooth on the top, for a total of 5. I am assuming #6 is going to come shortly because the drooling has increased significantly. Also, he is chewing on things more than normal. He has started to grind his teeth a little bit, just as Kayla did at this stage in teething. I'm hoping this is a short-lived thing because it sounds so horrible!
He still is just army crawling, although he is able to put himself on all 4's from a sitting position. But then as soon as he starts to move his gets down on his belly. He is getting a little faster, though. He sits very well on his own, not really falling at all (unless he intentionally puts himself on his belly to crawl!).
Kayla, Isaac and I all got a touch of the stomach bug this month (somehow David escaped it... and we also gave it to my parents, and yet David escaped it again! Lucky him!). For Isaac, that meant that he pretty much refused to eat solids for about a week and a half. Once he started eating again, his interest in solids was huge and he started eating a ton more quantity of food! I guess he was making up for lost time! This month we added oatmeal, peaches, butternut squash, stuffing (man did he like the stuffing!), pork, couscous and all sorts of crackers.
His spitting up has reduced so much that I haven't been using bibs this last month. He still spits up, but it's more like once or twice a day rather than once or twice a nursing. And when he does spit it's so little that simply wiping it up is sufficient, there is no need for an outfit change. Also, it's often that he spits up on the carpet rather than on himself because he's either sitting up and it goes on his pants or in between his legs, or because he's on his belly playing with a toy and just gets on the flood. That's a huge blessing, and a huge reduction in my laundry, since I'm not going through bibs and burp cloths and clothes! (I did put him in this cute bib for Christmas, though!)
Probably the biggest news is that shortly after Thanksgiving he started sleeping through the night. In his 8 month post I was saying that I was nursing him around 5 and then putting him to bed without nursing because he wasn’t hungry and he was waking about 10 and then again in the middle of the night. Well, one night he nursed at 4pm or something, so I thought he might be hungry enough to be nursed again before bedtime (previously I’d tried nursing him at 5pm and then again before bed, and he was still waking up around 11 and again in the middle of the night, and both the bedtime and 11 nursing were not very productive). And wouldn’t you know he slept for 12 hours! And then it happened again the next night, and the next! So, he just started doing it with absolutely no intervention other than patience on our part! It's funny, the same thing happened with Kayla, also in between 8-9 months. While on our vacation he was sleeping in our room and he started waking up once a night to nurse again. I wonder how much of that was because he was in a different bed and the fact that we were right there where I could hear his early whimpers. (Since I'm writing this so late, I will note that the first night we were back home and he was in his crib he started sleeping through the night again - YEAH!). It is really nice to have some solid uninterrupted sleep these days. So, he is typically up between 8 and 9 and is nursed and then eats solids for breakfast, goes down for a nap 2-3 hours after waking, is nursed again when he wakes up around 1, goes down for another nap 2-3 hours after waking and is nursed again around 5, and then he eats solids for dinner with us and then I nurse him again before bed which is usually between 8-9. So, he has four nursing sessions a day, is eating solids 2x a day and is taking 2 naps. Since he’s usually sleeping when we eat lunch, I haven’t gotten into a rhythm of feeding him solids for lunch yet! I also haven’t really been using a sippy cup much. I’ve tried a few times and he’s more interested in chewing it! But I probably should start offering him a cup more often.
He loves playing with toys and interacting with us and Kayla.
He's started using some more consonance in his babbling, adding mamama (which I love hearing him say mama, even though I know it's not like he knows what it means yet!) and bababa. He is not as vocal as I think he probably should be, but not to the point that I'm concerned or anything.
It's so funny how different my kids are.... by this age Kayla was crawling like crazy, pulling up and cruising on furniture and was 1 week away from taking her first steps. Isaac is just not motivated like that! He's much more laid back in temperament and as a result will reach those milestones significantly later than she did. I love both of their personalities and am thankful for both their similarities and their differences. It certainly is a blessing that he isn't as mobile as early as she was - it makes my job much easier!
He's such a sweet little cuddle-bug and a very content little boy. We love him to pieces.
How was that for being a little shorter?!