In my perfect blogging world, I would write “milestone” posts for each child: Describing personalities, how each child looked, how he or she acted, words they were saying, where they were at developmentally. And I would write these posts regularly: One month. Three months. Six months. Nine months. . . And for each child . . .
Yeah. . .
So far I think I’ve written one or two of these. Given that I have three children under four, I’m obviously behind!
For weeks now, I’ve been planning Carissa’s “6-Month” post. Then suddenly she was seven months old, and now–in just a week–she will eight months already! Amazing.
So here is a snapshot of Carissa at eight months old:
“Spunky” is the best way to describe my little Cutey Face. She officially began crawling around 7-1/2 months. She’s definitely my earliest crawler. After just a few days of the army crawl, she got up on all four and started rocking back and forth. With ease, she rolls, crawls, sits back up, and often extends both legs with her feet flat on the floor, as if she’s trying to stand straight up in the middle of the room without help! Probably her favorite activity is crawling around the room, chasing a beach ball. Of course, her brother loves to tease her by taking the ball away–or pushing it away, right before she gets to it. She loves the Disney “pop-up” toy, and feel compelled to push each of the characters down.
Carissa also pulls herself up in her crib, on toys and boxes–but she only gets as far as her knees. Usually she can “roll” into her fall and bounce right back. She loves toys that play music, and she “turns them on” and sits, bouncing to the beat.
Just last week I started putting her in the bathtub, instead of in the baby bath. She loves it! And more than the other two (at this age), she bravely crawled after toys that kept floating away.
She likes nothing better than being thrown up in the air! She laughs and laughs almost hysterically, and so contagiously, with a huge toothy smile. When you stop throwing her up, she will try to climb your shoulder, as if she plans to get up back in the air all by herself. I say that she is going to be my amusement-park-kid! The one who loves rides and thrills, adventure and living-on-the-edge.
She babbles all the time. If she really wants your attention and she’s not getting it, she will just scream glaring straight at you and then blink, very deliberately, and flash another grin.
Every morning she and Big Sister sit and talk and play until 7 AM, when I go to see them. I’m never quite sure what Mara is teaching Carissa, but I am sure that she is learning a LOT.
Micah adores his little sister. Whenever he comes into a room and sees her, his eyes melt and he says, “Hi, baby doll! Hi, baby doll!” In the grocery store last week, they were sitting together in the shopping cart (two-seats—Yay!) and he had his arm around her shoulders and kept leaning over to kiss her on her cheek. He was getting a lot of attention for that!
Carissa has a voracious appetite–she can eat 2 6-oz jars of baby food and a bowl of rice cereal in one meal! Unfortunately, this month she also completely quit nursing. She cries if I try to nurse her–this started the week that Tooth #5 and Tooth #6 came in–the week she also had a cold. Not sure why but she just won’t nurse. Thankfully, she will take breastmilk in a bottle, but wow, she is making life a lot more difficult! We are not ready to break down and buy formula yet, so I am pumping. And yes, I definitely miss nursing–it was so much faster, so much easier than pumping and feeding bottles!!!
On October 30, she weighed a healthy 19 lbs.–still on the upper end of the percentiles chart.
It’s hard to condense a precious little person into a blog post. And it’s even harder without pictures. But while I’ve waited for a chance to attach pictures to this post, she turned eight months old–so I figured I’d better just publish this now. . . before her first birthday.
Thank you. Thank you, Becky. 🙂