Eight Months

Look at that Craun calf action going on in his left leg!

Weight and height:  He's 19 1/2 pounds, and between 27 and 28 inches tall.


Sleeping patterns:  He's such a good little sleeper - I feel like we are extremely lucky! He sleeps like me - as soon as we lay him down on his back he rolls onto his side or tummy. A few times we've caught him sleeping like how Bri used to sleep when he was little - on his tummy with his butt up in the air. And likely an arm or leg will end up sticking out of the crib. We decided to lower his crib before he even gets the idea of pulling himself up in there.

Eating habits:  Solid food time is so less messy now. He's got it down! Dom now eats a large variety of foods, including fresh bananas and cucumbers in his fresh food teether. He loves that thing, and goes to town on it. The other day he ate half a banana in like five minutes! He also started eating sweet potato puffs. He's been able to get a few to his mouth on his own, but he's still refining his fine motor skills.

The most awesome thing happened in the last month too. He can now drink from his bottle without any assistance. We can just prop him up on the couch or with the Boppy pillow, set the bottle by him, and he does all the rest. We have all this extra time now!

Bananas for my little monkey

New discoveries he's made:  While he hasn't started fully crawling yet (thank God! I'm not ready for that yet!), he is pretty good at scooting backwards on his belly, going in circles, and army crawling forward (almost as bad as crawling). He is never in the same place if we put him down and leave the room for a few minutes. Because of that we set up gates to block the stairs in our main floor. Turns out we all hate them! I almost fell down the stairs the other day trying to carry my laundry down the stairs and the cats can't figure out that they can jump through the larger spaces. Coco freaking broke one three days in - just jumped through the swinging part and got her back legs caught. We didn't have the gate latched so it kinda swung open and BOOM. Coco and the gate ended up on the floor, and thankfully the only thing broken was one of the hinges on the gate. Which also means we need a new gate.

Accomplishments:  If he's not standing, he's trying to stand by attempting to pull himself up on his activity cube or looking at you like, "make me stand" or crying until you make him stand. He's getting closer to fully crawling now too. He gets up on his knees and rocks back and forth. We haven't made much more advancement on the sign language. He still signs for milk, and he knows what "eat" and "cat" mean. Brian and I have been slacking on this, mostly because the only thing he ever really cries about is being hungry and we have a way to communicate with him around that.

Places he went:  We went to Omaha the weekend before Christmas to celebrate the holidays with Brian's family, and then we spent Christmas eve and day at my parents. Good thing he goes to bed early so the adults could have fun with jello and pudding shots! :)

Special friends he's made:  No new friends this month.

Noises and babbles:  He says "dada" but I'm thinking it's still babbling and not anything meaningful yet. He's better at imitating the noises that we make, but mostly he's just interested in making excited screams/yells and saying "aaaaaahhhhh" over and over. It's funny when we go back and forth with our silly noises, and his giggles and belly laughs are so sweet! Brian is the master at getting Dominic to belly laugh. I love watching and listening to them play together!

Evening giggle session

Firsts:
Christmas
My favorite holiday ever! Dominic spent pretty much the whole month of December decked out in Christmas gear. One of my favorites was a shirt that had Buddy the Elf's hair and hat and said, "Raised by Elves." As evidenced by the pictures in last month's post, I was also obsessed with his Rudolph hat.

Dom loved looking at all the holiday decorations, and I think he had fun tearing open his presents. He got some pretty sweet toys for Christmas. He knows how to turn on his Elephun (yay babysitter for a few minutes) and he likes sitting on the motorcycle/walker thingy he got. And to Uncle JD's dismay, Dominic got his first drum set. After JD saw the picture of it, he said that the one he gets Dom someday is going to be even bigger and more obnoxious. Lucky us.

In his Christmas outfit from Grandma and Grandpa Craun

Another holiday matching with Bennett

New Year's Eve
So lame. Dom went to bed at his usually time (6:30), and Brian and I celebrated New York's NYE at 11 so we could go to sleep. We meant to celebrate at noon on New Year's day, and I even bought some hats for us all, but Dominic took an extra long nap then. So he never celebrated NYE. But he did pass out in his tux that night, and he peed on it the next day, so I think he did some of the same things some man somewhere in the world did that night.

I'm a little freaked out about how his toes look in this picture...they looked deformed!

Teeth
His bottom two teeth are in! They're so cute! He's starting to teethe again, so we think the top ones are starting to push through. We're trying to remember to brush them...key word there is trying.

And a side note:  we got a super nice camera for Christmas this year and I've taken a bajillion pictures with it. Maybe some day I'll post them on here!