Amaliya - 8 Months

My sweet girl has had a rough month!  She's been sick more or less consistently since February 20 with a cold, ear infection, another cold, and so on.  Her nose perpetually runs, her fever comes and goes, and the cough!  There's no sadder sound than a tiny baby hacking up a lung!  We've been to the pediatrician.... 3 times?  4 times?  I've lost count.  Often enough that I'm starting to feel like THAT mom though.  The paranoid first timer that runs to the doctor for every sniffle.   But what can you do, when daycare calls and tells you that your kid has a fever of 104?  You peel out of work like you were shot out of a cannon, call the pediatrician en route to pick her up, put your hot, stripped-to-the-diaper baby in the car seat, and make tracks to the doctor's office.  That's what you do.

 

 

I love her daycare, really.  The ladies that run the place are sweet and loving, they hold Amaliya and pay attention to her, they challenge her to work on her developmental skills, they celebrate her successes, they track her schedule down to the minute in order to satisfy my neurosis... and they CLEAN that place constantly!  I have to wear paper shoes every time I enter the infant room!  Yet, somehow, it is still an incubator for every germ known to man.  I hate it.  I hate hate hate it. I'm only hoping that she'll develop a superhuman immune system and be impervious by the time she enters preschool.

 

Anyway.

Amaliya Likes:

• Sucking on the index and middle fingers of her left hand.  As soon as she gets tired, those fingers are in her mouth.
• Laying her head on my chest and sucking her fingers when she's tired.  She's become quite the cuddle bug in the last week - instead of screaming when she's ready for a nap or bed, she'll snuggle up with me and let me lay down with her or rock her for a while before putting her in her crib. 
• Books.  We read a story or two every night before bed, and she's very content chilling out in my arms and listening.  During the day she loves touching her books and flipping the pages.
• Music and dancing.  She still giggles and flails when we dance with her.  When we play her YouTube videos of orchestras, they catch her attention for a relatively long period of time. 

Amaliya Dislikes:

• The NoseFrida, clove gel (for her gums), menthol rub, having her nose wiped, and all of the many things we do to/for her to keep her comfortable while she's been sick.
• Getting dressed.  Or undressed.  Or having her diaper changed. 
• When we check her teeth.  I think it's because her gums are sore - she used to love us sticking fingers in her mouth.  Now I have to dangle her upside down and tickle her (or make her mad so she screams) in order to see what's going on with her gums.
• Having her hair conditioned and combed.  It has gotten so long that I have to comb it out in the bath while the conditioner is still in.  It's a necessary evil, but wow, being shut in an echoey bathroom with a baby shrieking at the top of her lungs is a special kind of hell.
• When I leave her at daycare.  She used to be fairly cool about it and would smile at me until I left.  Now she bursts into tears and has to be immediately distracted.  Sometimes Miss 'Cedes brings her to the window, and I drive away while the saddest little baby face in the world watches me go.

Sleeping:

I've given up.  She hasn't slept 12 straight hours since February, due to being sick and teething and my unwillingness to try the cry-it-out method again because I never know if she's awake because something hurts and she needs me or if it's just habitual waking.  Sigh.  She has good nights, where she's only up once or twice.  She has bad nights when she's up 3-5 times (usually when she's really sick and congested, or when we screw up her daytime routine too badly).  All in all, though.... it's okay.  This is a kid that takes her sleep seriously, so I know that as soon as she's ready and able, we'll go back to uninterrupted nights.

 

Her nap schedule is still wonderful - she gets 3-4 hours of sleep during the day, divided between 2 naps.  Sometimes the morning nap is longer, sometimes it's the afternoon.  She barely naps for the two days a week she's at daycare - she'll have 3 or 4 short spurts of sleep, likely because it's so loud and active there - so the two days afterwards are spent catching up.  This past Thursday, she slept almost 14 hours overnight, was awake for two hours, then took an epic 4.5 hour nap! 

 

I've read that the "typical" baby her age gets 14-15 hours of sleep every 24 hours.  My kid averages about 16-18.  She loves her rest! 

 

Eating:

 We sucessfully (kind of) cut out her 2pm bottle and replaced it with a meal of solid foods.  Her schedule now looks something like:

 

6:30am - Breastfeed

7:30 - Breakfast

9:00 - Bottle (4oz)

12pm - Breastfeed

2pm - Lunch

4pm - Breastfeed

5:30 - Dinner

6:30 - Breastfeed

 

This schedule is not working too well, though, for obvious reasons.  Lunch is too late, and within 4 hours in the afternoon she is being breastfed twice and having two meals of solid foods - too much!  I don't know how we're going to fix it though, since it very much depends on my work schedule.  I really can't pump enough for two bottles a day anymore. 

 

Right at the 8 month mark we started introducing finger foods, with limited success.  She likes puffs, but has trouble actually getting them into her mouth.  Bananas end up squished in her fist.  She managed to successfully gnaw on a piece of pancake this morning, but the look on her face confirmed that she was NOT impressed.  We'll keep working on it.

 

What's New?:

 Still no rolling over or crawling, but she's getting closer.  When she's on her tummy she can kind of scoot around and is starting to push away from the ground with her feet.  She might crawl after all!  She also likes to grab our hands and pull herself into a standing position.  She sits up so well now that we gave her her first bath in the adult bathtub a couple weeks ago (she was not a fan, but that's another story).

The most fun thing this month has been watching her learn to communicate with us.  She's becoming more vocal, with more consonant sounds and less random growling.  She also seems to understand us more now.  If I say "kisses!" and point to my cheek, she will lunge in and plant a big, slobbery kiss on me.  She raises her arms when she wants to be picked up.  She snuggles up to me when she wants to go to sleep.  Little things, really, but it makes things so much easier.

This post is ridiculously disjointed and rambly - you can blame the Daycare Plague.  I have managed to contract tonsillitis and a sinus infection simultaneously.  Awesome.   Bed.... now....

Happy belated Easter, friends  :)