8 Months Old

Ella is 8 months old!  Only four months away from being a year old…I better get crackin’ on the birthday party preparation. ;)

We get more and more personality everyday.  She says all sorts of syllables, but her favorite thing is simply screeching and yelling…she is definitely learning her voice (and apparently loving the sound of it!).  She knows Rylee by name so if you say, “where’s Rylee?” she immediately looks at Rylee.  Of course if you say, “where’s mama?” or “where’s dada?” she just looks at her toys.  Nice.  I’m predicting “Rylee” as her first word.  She laughs all the time (and has just started snorting?), but can go from cracking up to completely serious in ½ a second.  She is a very happy baby but you will hear about it if she’s hungry, tired or bored.  Sometime between 7 and 8 months, she went from a mama’s girl to a TOTAL daddy’s girl.  She sees me, and it’s like “eh” (I’m not feeling the love lately!), but she sees daddy, and it’s like a friggin party!  She absolutely positively LOVES people.  She can be in the worst mood ever, and you walk her around a mall or somewhere with tons of people, and she’ll start hysterically laughing.  She still has no stranger anxiety (thank goodness), but she will cry now if everyone leaves the room.  She needs at least one person in the room with her for her entertainment. ;)

Her favorite toy is my old telephone rattle, but she's happy to play with anything that she can hold and get into her mouth.  She recently started exploring faces and will grab your nose or skin and touch everything.  Today I had on a hat with bling, and she was all about pulling up and down on the brim and touching the rhinestones.

She is still rolling like a mad woman.  She tries to almost pull herself up on our legs when we're laying down next to her, but she hasn't tried to pull herself up on any objects.  She sort of scoots herself forward when she's on her belly, but sometimes she accidentally turns over.  No crawling yet!

She has her two bottom teeth, which thank God did not affect her sleep and only slightly affected her mood.  We just started trying to give her solids 3 times a day (morning, noon and night), up from once a day.  She still eats oatmeal and purees for meals, but she finally started liking puffs and actually gumming them rather than swallowing them whole and choking.  Yesterday, we gave her Gerber pureed turkey with gravy, and she seems to like it!  We stopped her dream feed about 2 weeks ago so she gets 4 bottles a day, all about 6 oz. (the bedtime bottle is usually 8 oz.).

She still sleeps through the night (6:30/7 p.m. to about 6 a.m.) but often wakes up between 5:30 and 6 a.m.!!  The girl is an EARLY riser.  It’s not much of a problem because Gary gets up really early anyway (even on weekends), but if he has to travel for work, we are going to need to change some things around here.

We think she is about 18.5 pounds, and probably really tall because even 9 month size sleepers are too short for her so I just started buying her 12 month sleepers!  We have a future super model on our hands. ;)  She can wear anywhere from 3-6 month to 12 month in dresses, but is pretty much in 9 month for other clothes.  She recently moved up to a size 3 in diapers.

You're probably wondering where the monthly sign is...I think we're done with that. This was the best picture we could get...

But she immediately did this...

So Alex tried to hold the sign, which resulted in this series of photos...



And then she decided she'd relax.