Dear Levi - Eight Months Old (just a few days late!)

Dear Levi,

The tardiness of this post is a direct reflection of how much has changed in the past month. You have become the busiest little bean; mastered crawling at lightening speed, started pulling yourself to standing with ease, cruising around the furniture and taking steps behind your walker doing laps of the room (if only you could figure out how to turn it around by yourself!)

You are a busy kid. Exploring the world with an energy that inspires and exhausts me in equal measure.

You continue to explore with your pointer finger, which has led to us placing socket protectors on all the outlets we thought you would reach and get into and some that you discovered and we had missed. Those little holes are just the perfect size for your little fingers and you can't understand why we discourage you from sticking them in there.

This love of little holes has also helped you find another new skill. You were reaching to try and stick your finger in the keyhole on the TV cabinet when your hand would slip and catch the 'u' shaped handle which you then pulled to open the doors to the delights of the DVD player, cable box and cords galore. Daddy locked the cabinet and now you spend many infuriating minutes pulling hard on the handle trying to understand why it now won't open. However, this discovery opened your eyes to the wonder of door to open and the kitchen cabinets full of pots and pans have become your playground.

Your fine motor skills have really developed too, I think the desire to get those Cheerios and freeze dried yogurt drops into your mouth was enough motivation and now you are prone to keeping your mouth clamped shut when we try to feed you something that you consider you could put in your mouth by yourself. I am thankful you are still willing (and eager) to eat from a spoon without too much protest, although your bubble blowing while eating had resulted in me wearing an apron so I don't get pebble-dashed by your purees.

You are still sleeping a quasi schedule. You ave pretty consistently dropped your third nap, and have started showing signs that you might take longer naps but you seem to be most tired about an hour and a half after you first wake up - that nap is always your longest. I guess its a reflection of the fact you are still up two or three times a night :) Your bedtime is still between 6 and 7pm and you are getting better at settling to sleep even though you now enjoy cruising around holding onto the sides of your crib and throwing your lovie or your socks out across the room! You have quite the arm already little man, future Mariner perhaps? You Dad would love that!

You are ever more verbal, jabbering away from the second you wake up until you finally give up and fall asleep. You still seem to favor "Dada" over any other word, but I am still hoping that "Mama" will makes its way into your vocab soon. I can't wait to see you start using those words to call for us specifically. At present when you are trying to get our attention, or anyone's really, you stare and yell, "AH!" And you will not be denied, you can keep yelling until you are responded to. This made for much entertainment after I turned off the 'View', a chat show on TV and the faces of the women disappeared. You were staring at the blank screen and yelling and yelling, getting quite perturbed that they were not returning at your call!! ha ha

Your sense of humor is a delight to watch unfold. Your laugh is amazing, music to this mama's ears.

Love you Buggaboo,

Mama x
Here is a picture snapped right after I was trying to feed you and you blew a bubble. Gross. But cute too :)

Cute Pajamas, and Routines at last.

When you are about to have a baby, people give you lots of tips and recommendations for the things that they couldn't live without in their motherhood experience. Things that rocked the baby to sleep, potions and devices that help your baby pass gas or get rid of snot, cream that made your nipples not fall off, onesies that were so soft you wanted to snuggle them even before they were wrapped around your infant...but I will be adding a new "must have' item to the list.

Cute Pajamas.

Pre-baby I imagined that I would get up and dressed before the baby woke up, have a cup of coffee and do a devotional to have some 'me' time. Then the baby would gloriously wake up right on cue as I sipped my last sip and closed the page of my book. Ok, laugh away, get it out of your system, But no tales of exhaustion and lack of time for the basics such as showers or using the loo could dim my beautiful fantasy. And then I had Levi, and endured a few 'forced' pajama days because I literally didn't have time to change, let alone wash any part of my body while caring for my sweet baby boy.

My early rising dream bubble quickly burst. I was not going to be giving up any precious sleep. I would have my 'me' time in bed. Asleep.

But life moved on. Levi started napping and slowly but surely, here we are at almost 8 months (!!?) in a pretty consistent routine - and yes, I understand that simply typing those words might jinx the whole thing.

He wakes up between 6.30 and 7am, happy as a clam, chatting up a storm and ready for fun. I am not willing to get up before this. He has been waking just twice through the night (down for 3 or 4 when he was teething) to feed which is totally do-able, but even so, I need to sleep all that I can. But that has meant I am spending the first few hours of my day in pajamas.

Levi gets up, nurses, we sit in bed, we read books, I catch a few minutes of the today show and then we head down stairs for breakfast. I make food for both of us, Levi cheering me on from his highchair. We eat. I clean up the mess - also known as Levi - and then it's back up stairs for Levi to go down for his first nap. He goes down about 2 hours after he wakes up, he can't seem to last much longer.

And then the 'me' time starts. Not that it is as beautiful as my imaginary me time had been. It involves a rush to shower do my hair & makeup because without those I don't feel human. Once I am put together I fell as though I can take on the world. I usually am throwing on a load of diapers rather than reading anything, and am gulping down a usually cold-by-the-time-I-get-to-it, cup of tea. while pumping and if I am really lucky, catching 20 minutes of something on the DVR before Levi wakes up.

All that to say, Yay! for routines and also to reveal the importance of cute pajamas. They are what I wear a few hours in the morning, and after I peel off the spit up and food particle covered clothes from the day. And they are sometimes the only thing Jeremy see same wearing, if the spit up had been especially forthcoming and I have changed before Levi is in bed. 

Gone are the days of lacy nighties and newlywed satin numbers. I am talking comfortable as well as cute. It would be easy to just pull on a pair of J's over-sized PJ bottoms and an old T-shirt of his - that would fill the comfy criteria, but not the cute one. So I invested in a couple of pairs, and had another give as a Christmas present. They make me feel good about myself. And if I do say so myself, I look cute in them.

So ladies - it is tough to feel good about a post baby body sometimes, and it can be tough to feel pretty when your clothes are covered on sticky fingerprints but having cute jammies to change into at the end of the day can really make all the difference!

That was a long post... I will reward your faithful reading with a shot of the bubs in his Tigger towel. Pretty adroable!