Molly - 7 months

Better late than never!  Molly hit 7-months-old on August 23rd.

She's still a very happy girl and relatively content most of the time.  We've definitely hit a fussier, clingier stage and I suspect it's due to a little bit of separation anxiety and teething.

Sleep hasn't been so great, but it could be worse.  She still goes to sleep pretty easily most times, but nap lengths are pretty unpredictable and she's been waking quite a bit at night.  She's been in her own room for a few weeks now and it hasn't seemed to impact her sleep either way, which is a good thing, I guess, even though some improvement would have been welcome :)  Moving her was definitely bittersweet.  While it's nice to have our room back to ourselves, and I know she was ready for her own space, I certainly miss her sleeping close to me.  She transitioned very well though and I do think she's ultimately more comfortable in her new digs.

Right now she tends to wake up around 7-8am, takes her first nap around 9-10am (~2 hours after waking).  She will sleep anywhere from 30 minutes-1 1/2 hours and typically falls somewhere in the middle of that range.  She takes her second nap about 3 hours after she wakes from her morning nap, which typically puts it around 1-2pm (again, she will sleep anywhere from 30 minutes-1 1/2 hours, typically around an hour-ish) and then she goes to bed between 7-7.30pm, which is hopefully about 4 hours (sometimes a bit longer) after she wakes from her second nap.  She's consistently on a 2 nap a day schedule at this point.  Some days (especially if it's a longer than 4 hour stretch until bedtime) she'll get pretty tired around dinner time, but at this point putting her down for a third nap just doesn't work out so well so we don't even try and just hold out until bedtime.

Now... overnight.  For probably 2  months now she's been waking at least once overnight.  The last couple of weeks she has been up more frequently than that, up to 3 times overnight and sometimes once even before Mark and I go to bed for the night.  It's often.  I really think it started with a growth spurt where she was waking once to get some food in her tummy and then escalated from there due to teething discomfort.  However, other than the night wakings she hasn't shown super obvious signs of teething.  After a couple particularly rough nights I decided it was time to introduce the amber teething necklace.  It might be a coincidence, but the day after I put the necklace on her (not the same night, the following night) she slept clear through the night and has slept through the night for 3 nights in a row now (::knocks on wood hoping I didn't just jinx it::).  I like to believe in the magical amber!  I do hope it's because she's more comfortable.  We'll see what happens.

She's eating anywhere from 4-8oz of formula at a time.  She typically eats upon waking and before going to sleep.  I feel like in the last handful of days she's been more frequently taking 5oz than 4oz at a feeding, so that's good.  I'm sure that's probably helping her nighttime sleep too.  I think that might be happening because I switched her from a stage 2 to a stage 3 nipple.  She was still eating fine from a stage 2, but she had a few days where she was particularly fussy with food and wasn't taking much at all during a feeding so I thought it would be a good time to try out a stage 3 nipple and it has seemed to help.  Maybe she was bored with the slower flow.

Eating chicken, strawberries, and avocado

Molly is doing awesome with solid foods.  She's still exclusively doing baby-led weaning and this girl loves her food.  She has tried all sorts of things at this point.  Notable favorites seem to be sweet potatoes, chicken (yeah, chicken!  It's crazy.), and bananas, and she seems to love pretty much any fruit you put in front of her.  She does really good with everything though.  She's eating all sorts of things and gets really excited for meal time.  She eats dinner every night, I've started to introduce lunch to her as well, but need to become more consistent with it.  We tried out a sippy cup of water one night and it was a disaster.  It was just a distracting toy, not something to drink from.  We'll work on it.

She scoots around just enough to get where she wants to go eventually.

This month she has become semi-mobile.  She's not crawling yet, but she's reaching and stretching so far for things that she's gradually scooting herself around.  If you recall, Jack was a scooter, he never crawled.  I think it's because neither of my babies have liked to be on their tummies (when I put them down they just flip right over onto their backs) so it will be interesting to see what happens with Molly.  She has been doing some backwards belly scooting, which I'm sure may just evolve into crawling.

We've been predominately using the Boba lately for babywearing purposes.  It fits her well right now and you can't beat the simplicity of pre-adjusted buckles and straps.  I have gotten some good back carries with the wrap (YAY!) so that's still in use as well.  I really struggled with back-wrapping at first, but I think now that Molly is a little bigger I can finally get my short arms back there (some what :/ ) to properly wrap her up.  I still need a mirror to properly accomplish it though so no back-wrapping in public yet.

This kid is a hair. puller.  She will yank on any hair she can get a hold of, which 98% of the time, of course, is mine.  Ouch!  I pick her up and she immediately clings to my hair like a little monkey.  She's drinking her bottle and yanking on my hair.  Jack's playing on the ground within reach of her go-go-gadget arms and she helps herself to a fist full.  Luckily I have a lot of hair to spare or I'd probably have bald spots at this point.  It's even worse when my hair is pulled up because then she gets the baby hairs, which hurt REALLY bad!  At least she's... secure?  When I'm holding her.  We can move out of this hair pulling thing any time now.

Lately Molly has introduced new babbling sounds.  She loves to "talk" and "sing" and her favorite babble term right now seems to be DA-DA-DA-DA-DAAAAA!  Of course, she would say "dada" first ;)

Due to her interest in everything she can get her hands on and her semi-mobility, pictures this month were difficult to come by.  Most of them look like this:

So begins the challenging portion of photographic documentation.