8 Months

There is no way that we are already two thirds of the way through the first year with this little man! He is SUCH a wonderful baby and a true joy in our lives.

EATING: Joel takes 4 bottles a day...each are about 6 ounces. He does great with solids and even seems to be more interested in table food than baby food. He can feed himself puffs, cheerios, peas, and other small foods, so we are going to try to head in that direction soon. Most of the time he swats at the spoon of baby food and makes a huge mess, so we might spare everyone the headache and just start giving him small foods the he can feed himself. Whatever it is, he has to be able to gum it, because he still doesn't have teeth!

SLEEPING: His sleeping schedule is fantastic! He goes down around 7:30 or 8 at night and sleeps until 7:30 or 8 in the morning. He takes his first nap around 9:30 and his second nap around 1:30. His naps vary from a little over an hour to 2+ hours in length. He did have a little trouble sticking to that this past month because he had a terrible cold that lasted for two weeks. His sleeping was a bit off, but that was to be expected!

MILESTONES: Despite being sick with a nasty cold, Joel managed to learn a ton of new skills over the past couple of weeks. He is moving much faster and can crawl the correct way, but still prefers the army crawl. He can go from his belly to sitting up all by himself. He has also learned to pull himself up to a stand. All of those skills were mastered within one week. Joel is just like Caleb was and becomes incredibly preoccupied with learning new skills. When he's supposed to be sleeping, he spends time "practicing" his new skills. He's also becoming much better with language. He shakes his head when someone says, "no, no, no" and claps if you say "yaaaay". He occasionally signs for "more" and has a bunch of new consonant sounds that he babbles. One of the newest sounds is da, which of course sounds like DaDa, but I'm not sure I'm willing to call it his first word just yet. There doesn't seem to be much meaning behind the babbling!