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Madeline is 8 months old today, so it’s time for another letter to Maddie! I can’t believe how fast the time is passing.

Dear Madeline,

Wow! I can’t believe that you have another month under your belt. Your first 8 months have really flown by. You are such a joy to be around these days. I won’t say that you’re always an easy baby, but we feel pretty confident about taking you places as long as you’re fed and you’re not in need of a nap. It also helps to distract you with toys and Cheerios. We have received compliments on several occasions about what a good baby you are. “She’s the best baby we’ve seen in a while! She’s so quiet! She was so good!” We are beaming with pride and think, “wow, she’s really got them fooled!” Just kidding! These days, you are really a pretty happy baby. You have your moments, especially when it comes to bedtime, but overall you’re a pure joy to be around. We love you more and more every day.

In this past month, you started to run out of clothes. Don’t worry, you are in no danger of going naked. We just moved you from the 3-6 month clothing to the 6-9 month clothing. We found that we had a need to go shopping! Your Mommy and Daddy are very thankful for all the hand-me-downs and gifts that have kept you sufficiently clothed for the most part for over 7 months. I must admit that it is awfully fun to go shopping for you! I’m thrilled to finally have a reason to buy you an excessive amount of adorable clothing. I’ve made several trips to Kohl’s and Target as well as shopping excursions to Children’s Place and the Carter’s Outlet.

As the weather got cooler, we discovered that you have difficulty crawling in sleepers (guess there’s a reason they are called sleepers, eh?), so we have acquired a variety of pants and leggings to keep you warm without impeding your movements. Speaking of movements, you’re still crawling circles around other babies. You are cruising the furniture at will, and you’ll even try to stand up in the middle of the room. Recently, I have seen you let go of the furniture and attempt to remain standing. You haven’t been too successful at this yet, but I am guessing you will have this figured out soon enough.

You are constantly on the move. We have barricaded the living room with miscellaneous furniture, larger toys, and the pack-n-play we used to use as your bassinet. This makes for an interesting time for the adults, too. All of these makeshift “baby gates” worked pretty well at first, but you’re starting to find holes in our security. If there’s any way that you can squeeze through a gap, you will find it. You keep us on our toes, that’s for sure. We still use the phrase “not for babies” fairly often.

You attended your first college class this month. A friend of ours is a professor at Meredith, and she invited you to her classroom for her child psychology students to observe your behavior. They seemed impressed as you demonstrated your gross motor skills, partial object permanence, your pincer grasp, and problem solving skills. Your mommy was very proud of you as the class observed (as well as cooed over you) and threw around terms and phrases such as secondary circular reaction, goal orientation, habituation, A-not-B errors, cephalocaudal development, and proximal-distal principle. I didn’t know what they were talking about half the time, but you seemed to know what you should do. I was most proud of you when you employed problem solving skills to retrieve a toy trapped under a clear plastic cover. Oh, did I say toy? I meant the remote control. I thought that would suffice as “a favorite toy” for the purposes of the class. It did not disappoint.

It’s hard for me to say what is currently your favorite toy. You do love your LeapFrog Activity table and your baby grand piano. You are still deeply fascinated with anything that is “not for babies,” including the Wii controllers and wheels, remote controls, laptops, and cordless phones. When we visit with your grandparents on the webcam, you are totally obsessed with the phone. You become very angry if we try to take the phone away from you, so we have to be sneaky about using it. If the phone is hidden from your view (and earshot), then you’re obsessed with the laptop. This makes it hard for the grandparents to view the baby in her natural habitat, but they don’t mind the up close and personal shots as you attempt to drool on the keyboard and lick the screen.

It’s so neat to see your developing personality, but you still like to throw a good fit. Currently, I’m trying to write this letter to you while your Daddy rocks you to sleep. This is not going well. I am hoping that it is not because of the dairy that I’ve been ingesting in the past week or so. We wanted to see if you were still affected by the the dairy in my diet. You have been acting fairly normal, but you’ve been putting up more of a fight at bedtime for the past several days. We’ll have to see how things go over the next week or so. I tend to nurse you in the morning before we leave to go to daycare, once during the day, and once towards the end of the work day (usually just after I finish working). You have been eating fruits and vegetables for lunch at school, fruits and vegetables for dinner, and two snacks consisting of puffs or Cheerios each day. You had your first introduction to Cheerios this month, and you seem to LOVE them. I was worried you wouldn’t be interested in the Cheerios since you have had fruit and veggie flavored puffs. Turns out there was no need to worry about that — you can’t seem to get enough of the Cheerios. You tend to nurse once more before bedtime and then several times through the night.

Bedtime is a struggle nearly every night. Daddy is best at rocking you to sleep and sneaking out of the room once he lays you down in your crib. You often wake up as soon as you breach the perimeter of the crib. You usually sleep for 2-3 hours before calling us to retrieve you. At this point, you join us in our bed where we all sleep the rest of the night. You wake up fairly frequently, but you typically go back to sleep pretty quickly. You nurse often during the night…sometimes for hunger and sometimes for comfort. Every once in a while, you wake up in the middle of the night and want to play. This can be frustrating at times, but we can’t be too upset at your cute little face. Most of the time, we all get plenty of sleep…just not in the solid stretches that we might all prefer. I love snuggling next to you throughout the night and waking up to see your sweet face. You almost always greet me in the morning with huge gummy grins. Often, I’ll leave you to snooze with Daddy while I get ready for work, and it is very sweet to see the two of you all cuddled and cozy.

Swimming lessons were a bust again this month. They didn’t have enough babies for the class, but we are determined and signed you up for November’s class. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we will be able to do it this time. I really think that you’ll enjoy swimming. I even bought you a new swimsuit that will be quite cute.

Daddy switched jobs this month and now works from home fulltime. We miss him on our daily commute! We took a few days of vacation to hang out with him while he was between jobs. During this time, we obtained your very first passport! I’m not sure where we are going to go quite yet, but we’re thinking about some possible tropical destinations for the winter. Your passport photo turned out pretty well with your cute little baby head.

We had a few rough moments this month. Catherine came to take our family’s photos again, and the night before she arrived you headbutted me right in the lip. Ouch! This happened in the middle of the night, and we weren’t sure if we were going to have to rush to the ER for stitches. Thankfully, you only left me with a very sore, and very fat, bottom lip. We haven’t seen the results of the photo session quite yet, but I’m hoping that they aren’t too bad. Thank goodness for Photoshop. You had another cold this month, and it seemed to be a rough one. You did a lot of screaming throughout the day (and especially night) for several days. It makes me so sad to see you suffering like that when there’s nothing that I can do to help you. We just comforted you the best that we could until you were better. This was one of the first times when Daddy and I stayed well throughout your illness. We were happy for that!

You have been “talking” more and more this month. You have started saying “Dada” quite frequently, though it doesn’t seem to have context quite yet. You did look at Daddy one day during dinner and say, “Dada!” I’m sure that this was coincidence, but it really melted our hearts. In the last few days, you’ve been saying something that sounds like “uh oh.” You’ve also been blowing raspberries, and it amuses you greatly when we repeat the sounds back to you. You also will repeat us when you feel like it and we make various sounds such as “dadadada.” The other day, you were laughing more than we’ve ever seen you laugh when I was crawling after you around the house saying, “I’m gonna getcha!” Your laughter is one of my favorite things in life.

I love being your Mommy. You make me smile every single day, no matter how tired I am or how long of a day I have had at work. You are very generous with your smiles these days. You and I have a special cute way of saying “I love you” where you press your face against mine, nose to nose, eyes to eyes. It’s pretty awesome. You’re a very sweet baby, and I feel like the luckiest Mommy in the world. Happy 8 months, Madeline! I can’t wait to see what joys we will encounter in the coming months. Your Daddy and I love you more than you will ever know.

Love,
Mommy

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Posted by kerry on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 6:30pm.
Categories: life.