8 Months Old!

   Our little Joy-bug is 8 Months Old! She had her 8-month "birthday" on Tuesday, but since we were on vacation, I'm a little late with this post. She is just under 19 lbs (50th percentile) and about 27 in. long (50th percentile). She's thinned out a lot, but she hasn't been eating or drinking well at all lately. I'm thinking it had something to do with the double ear infection she had a couple weeks ago and whatever she had that made her run fever most of last week. She's transitioning from size 6-9 M clothes to size 12 M clothes & she's up to size 18 M sleepers. She wears size 3 diapers, and size 2 shoes (very rarely; she prefers to be barefoot!). She goes to bed around 8 pm and wakes up around 6 am. She is still mostly breastfed, however while on vacation, she had a lot of formula partly out of convenience and partly because it was difficult for me to stay hydrated enough to keep up with what she needed. Since I'm on summer break, I will have time this week to work on getting my supply and routine back to where it should be, and my goal is to have her 100% breastfed on days that we stay home, and only use formula for when we go out. (She is too wild to attempt nursing in public at this age, she always pulls the cover down! :o)

     She has 2 little teeth, both on bottom! She is trying to crawl, but still hasn't officially crawled, yet. She's getting good at scooting around though, and can support her weight and stand by holding onto something. She's finally mastered her sippy within this last week, and has also started holding her own bottles. She is still not such a great napper. She's getting better though, and typically takes two 1 1/2 - 2 hour long naps and one evening catnap per day.

  Until last week, she was still eating 4 tbsp cereal and a babyfood fruit for breakfast, a babyfood fruit and a babyfood veggie for lunch, and a gerber yogurt and babyfood meal for dinner, but all of the sudden she won't eat her babyfood at all right now. She will still chow down on puffs or table foods, but she's refusing her babyfood, and she hasn't been drinking well either. I'm still offering them to her, though. I'm hoping it's just something to do with how she's been sick lately, and things go back to normal soon. It worries me because I've noticed her thinning out, and she dropped down from a weight in the 75th percentile last month to the 50th percentile this month. I hope she starts eating like she used to soon!

  We've had some new adventures this month: her first time playing a the park and her first beach vacation! She still loves the outdoors, so both adventures were right up her alley! She is ALWAYS smiling. She babbles constantly, but she has a few words she connects meaning to: "dada," "hi/hey," "baba" (I've noticed she refers to both breast and bottle as "baba"), and "wawa" (this is what she consistently calls Rylee). I'm impressed at how much she talks, but I know she is learning a lot from her big sister!

    We took her to the pediatric eye dr., and he wanted us to wait a little longer to see if her tear duct would unblock on its own. If not, she will have a probe in July to manually unblock it. She will not have to be put to sleep, so I was excited to hear that! It still has issues with running at this point, but it doesn't seem to bother her, so we will wait and see if it clears up on its own!