Bradley is becoming a menace. This kid can motor around pretty efficiently these days and his favorite things are eating pieces of his foam mat (acceptable), trying to grab and eat Christmas decorations off the tree (unacceptable), and trying to eat any power cords he can find (HIGHLY unacceptable). Nathan took a video today of me moving the vacuum cleaner and Nathan's slippers away from Bradley as the child scoots after them with great determination. What a stinker. We don't have any baby gates as of yet so it's a little thrilling whenever I try to leave him alone in the living room for 30 seconds in order to use the bathroom or get food or any other silly thing I like to do. He'll be happily playing with his little people cars one minute and the next minute he's moved on to trying to take down the Christmas tree. I have a video of him getting upset at the tree when the branches touch his head while he's trying to get his grubby little hands on a shiny ornament. This is my kid all right.
He's getting moderately better at being left alone to play. I've learned that he doesn't like to be totally abandoned, he prefers it when I come and check in on him and say hi every few minutes. That way you know that if you need Mommy she will be available to you in a timely manner. These things are important to a little boy.
And in AMAZING MARVELOUS news, Bradley now sleeps through the night! At least, he doesn't require any milk during the night anymore. On the night that he turned 8 months old Nathan and I had grand plans of trying to wean him off his night feed and have Nathan go in to do the "pick up put down" method of handling a crying baby in order to get him to sleep despite only getting half of a meal from Mommy. Which was going to work down to a quarter meal and then nothing at all over subsequent nights. Bradley must have heard what was in store for him because he slept through the entire night and didn't even bother waking for what was certain to be an unpleasant experience. Smart baby! Since then he's done a moderately good job of sleeping through the night. He'll wake up if he has a poo and generally go right back to sleep. After 8 months of disrupted sleep this is miraculously amazingly wonderful for his poor parents.
A problem has been the number of poos he's had during the night though ... there were two or even three per night for a while. It turned out the issue was that our little tank of a child was eating too much. You know how they say to feed your child as long as they seem interested in the food and aren't turning it away? That doesn't work with Bradley. He LOVES food so much and doesn't seem to realize that he has an option not to eat what is held up in a spoon in front of him. One day I fed him 14 or 15 ice cubes of food for lunch - that's an entire ice cube tray of food. For a 22 lb baby. That's crazy. So now we cut him off at 10 or 11 ice cubes and it seems to be working. Maybe if we only fed him peas and zucchini we wouldn't have a problem since he actively hates both of these foods and might not eat them even if he was starving.
Among the things Bradley likes to eat these days are my hair and my shoulder. I don't really mind him chewing on my hair, he seems to especially like it when it's wet, I just think it's a little odd. But I am not cool with the shoulder chewing, especially now that he likes to get his teeth into the action. Bradley definitely knows the word "no" now and cries whenever I use it.
We've been working on baby signs ... sort of. The issue may be that I really don't care if he learns how to sign and I only want to teach him a few signs anyway. We've been doing a lot of "more" during meals and he just makes excited anxious noises whenever I pause to do so, mostly because I think he's upset that the progression of food to his mouth has been slowed. The only baby sign that I'm sure I could teach him almost instantly is "I want that forbidden thing over there." If he made a sign and immediately got the forbidden thing he'd be doing it all day.
He is getting rather verbal, it's rather shocking that a child left with me all day would like to talk! He somehow learned how to roll his r's and likes to practice this skill a lot. One's chin gets covered in a good amount of drool when one does this properly, luckily Bradley doesn't seem to mind.
We just had another meeting with our parenting group a couple nights ago and had a blast with all the babies rolling around excitedly playing with toys and trying to grab at each other. We are loving this stage with Bradley, it's so fun to see him so interested in everything and getting to be so aware of the world around him. It's also such a sweet stage, he adores his mommy and daddy and all he needs to be happy is to have one of us spending time with him. And I know I'm going to regret saying this when he's older and truly getting into some trouble - but I love that I'm getting to see his impish side. What a fun kid!
No comments:
Post a Comment