8 months

Dear Ethan,

You turned 8 months old at Ampersand, so I'm a little behind.  Let's see if I can remember what you were doing 2 weeks ago.  You're moving too fast to keep up!

 

You continue to use the army crawl almost exclusively, but you're getting more skilled at it.  You are beginning to explore more and more.  You also figured out how to sit back up from crawling, which is one of my very favorite milestones :)  

Exploring inside the cabinet :)

You have pulled up to standing, although it is not at all a regular thing.  It was quite a surprise, though, to be sitting in Ryan's room playing with him and look over to find you standing up, holding onto his bed!

Practicing your standing with Daddy

Apparently, you were teething last month, because on July 30, you got your first tooth!  It's hanging out by itself for now.  I joke that you just want to be like your cousin, Courtney, because now you both have just the one bottom tooth.  It's pretty cute.

You had your first bath in the big tub this month with your brothers.  I was a little nervous putting all 3 of you in there, but Ryan was a safe buffer between you & Kaeden, and I think it was actually helpful to be crammed in there so that you weren't as likely to topple over.  Anyway, you loved it!  Soaked up every minute of it :)  

 

 

Note the water flying past your head :)

You are eating like crazy.  You love food... especially food that you can feed yourself.  I introduced puffs this month and you were so thrilled with that that you quickly moved on to cheerios, yogurt melts, little slices of banana, peach, and your new favorite (introduced at Ampersand)... watermelon!

You are also in a squealing/shrieking phase, which drove everybody a little crazy at Ampersand.  You use it to communicate, and most of your urgent communication happens at meal time when you're not getting food fast enough, so there was a lot of meal-time squealing going on.

Kaeden, insisting on feeding you your water bottle that you haven't yet really taken to.

Most of the time, you only take 2 naps now, unless one of them is especially short or you wake up super early.  You are eating 3 meals a day and then nursing either 4 or 5 times depending on how the day goes.  Of course, our first night at Ampersand, I was so scatter-brained that I forgot to nurse you before bed and you didn't seem to notice or mind... or perhaps you were just so worn out from the trip!

I thought that Ampersand would be the perfect place for your 8 month photos, but as it turns out, you really like to eat grass.  Getting you to look at the camera in any kind of natural environment was a challenge to say the least.  For every photo of you looking up, there are at least 5 of you reaching for and/or eating grass.  Still, the backgrounds are nice.  Here are the highlights :)