The little guy is about 8.5 months old now. He's doing things physically at a later time period than his sister. This is no problem at all, considering the Pumpkin did all physical and verbal things crazy early. However, what does seem to be frustrating for him is that he's trying to do it all at once.
Over the last month, he's been working on crawling, sitting, pushing to a seated position, feeding himself, manipulating toys, jumping in little activity centers and even trying to stand up! I am thinking that because he is trying to do all of these things at the same time, it's taking him a while to master any of them.
He still can't quite figure out how to crawl. I think it's so cute when he is on his hands and knees and rocks back and forth, and I love to watch it possibly because his sister barely did that at all. Almost every time I go to him in the middle of the night, he's on his hands and knees in his crib and crying. Poor guy. And poor me, cause this happens too much lately. He has figured out how to move his hands and his legs, but he doesn't have the timing or balance or whatever it is to actually start crawling yet.
When I sit him up, he stablizes for a little while. But when he focuses his attention on something like a toy? He loses his balance and topples over to the side. TIMBER! This is why we can't just plop him down somewhere and leave him. We have to sit him up with the Boppy around him or put him between our legs.
Though he's been actively working on pushing to a seated position in less time than the other skills, he is closer to master it than the others. I actually think he figured it out by accident. I noticed when he was trying to crawl, he would sometimes push one side more than the other. Then he noticed it helped him reach things. So he quickly put it together and now can push up to a mostly seated position, though he needs one arm propped on the floor and can't quite push off that to sit up straight.
He likes to have something to feed himself while we are feeding him. The complete baby-led feeding/weaning wasn't working for him or us, so we are spoon feeding him mostly. But we've continued to give him some finger food, and he's gotten quite good at getting it in his mouth.
He's at a really neat stage where he is able to start manipulating toys and figuring them out. I love when he jumps in his activity center while pulling and banging on toys. He's just really interested in all the things around him.
Similar to how he started figuring out how to push up to sitting, he is trying to push up to standing. There's no way he'll get there yet, but it's fun to watch him try! Also, he loves to pull himself up to standing by holding onto someone's hands. He's been doing it for a while, but we can just feel him getting stronger and more sure in his movements.
Is it no wonder his sleeping has been all over the place? Literally and figuratively. He moves all around his crib during the night. And we cannot predict his wake ups. Some nights, he wakes only once, and others he is up three times or really early or in some way tough on us all. Plus, his two front, top teeth are so close to cutting through!
There's just a lot going on in his little body. His amazing, growing, changing, developing, becoming-a-boy body! And yet he's still a very happy-go-lucky smile guy!
4 comments:
Awww... what a fun age.
Petunia is still trying to work herself up to rolling over. Pumpkin had already mastered that at her age, but I've put that down to the huge difference in weight. Pumpkin was tiny for her age. Petunia is huge! If I went for a third, I wonder if I'd get average? (No, I'm not going to try.)
I'd forgotten how exciting it was to watch all that happen. Tate rocked on all fours for a while before he figured out how to coordinate his limbs. One of my favorite pictures of him is on all fours with the biggest I'm the bomb grin on his face. Here's hoping he gets the hang of something soon and settles down for some good night time sleep!
haha.. my boy is at the same stage. Baby-led weaning question. How big of pieces do you give the boy? I tried giving mine a chunk of bread yesterday and he stuffed the whole thing in his mouth, gagged, and it came out and onto the floor while I tried to decide whether it was choking and required intervention or not. Should I be tearing it up into bite size pieces, or continuing with large pieces to see if he figures it out?
@songbird - We give him slices the size of steak fries (those thick french fries they serve in nice restaurants). That way he is able to hold on to the food and have an end out to stick in his mouth. What you will find is that they do need to figure out what they can handle in their mouths and need to figure out how to manipulate the food in their mouths, how to chew it and when to swallow. You definitely have to watch for choking, but usually if they do anything it's gag a little and spit it out themselves.
Good luck! And if you are interested in baby-led feeding/weaning, I wrote a post all about doing that style with the Pumpkin, and I have some links at the bottom of it (although I don't know if those links are still good). The post I wrote is on the right, under Posts Important to Me, and is called Feeding the Child (Baby-Led Weaning/Feeding).
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