Stats

Size 3 diapers
Wearing anything from 6-12 month clothing; 9-12m fits best.
20.2 pounds (50%) & 28.5 inches (34%)

Notable events

He entered a new year! But nothing else really interesting this month, except of course a few milestones that we’ll get to below!

Tricks/Milestones

He’s doing all sorts of new things this month!!

Clapping
Waving (kind of . . . it’s more like an up-and-down wave rather than a side-to-side wave — like he’s pawing at you 🤣 It’s especially funny when he does this starting from a crawling position 😍)
For most of the month, he’s been pulling up on things to his knees, including our legs when he wants us to pick him up 🤣 Then literally TODAY, he has pulled up on some things to his feet! Including his crib and his fabric bookshelf thing, but not the couch, so basically things that have more of a handhold for him. So it’s time to lower the crib mattress for safety! (Truly, I should have done it a few weeks ago before he pulled to stand completely, but now I definitely have to get it done!)
Occasionally he’ll try to sort of get to his feet while crawling. It’s not like a full-on bear crawl, but something like that.

Favorite things

He has been loving putting his finger in my mouth while I nurse him. I don’t mind, except when he scrapes my gums with his fingernail 😵
Russ bought a robo vacuum to fix up, and Peter was OBSESSED with it for the few days that it was out. He would crawl over to it and turn it on, and lean on it as it started to roll away, and he would make the stationary vaccum part suck up the moving vacuum part constantly. That’s how it ended up unplugged and back out of the house to be sold.
He giggles so much when he’s tickled or when Russ makes a sort of growling noise at him 😍

Random tidbits

He gets very distracted while eating if anyone else is around. I was feeling like he wasn’t nursing as much anymore, but he eats for longer now that I nurse him alone in his room mostly — I have to shoo the girls away!
In the morning, I feed him alone in his room, and then the two of us hang out in there while he wanders around his books and toys, until the girls come in around 7. Usually the girls hang out in his room for a bit, too. But whenever we’re ready to leave his room and we open the door, he makes a beeline for it!
When he does a crawl-squat, it is so stinking cute. What this means is he’ll be crawling, then he’ll try to look under something, like the couch or bookshelf, and if he were walking it would be a squat, but since he’s crawling, it’s a crawl-squat, and it just looks really cute 😍

Sleep

KNOCK ON WOOD but his sleep has been consistently good for longer than 5 minutes!! It’s actually been pretty solid for the last THREE WEEKS. Cue the hallelujah chorus!

I wake him at 6:30am. Occasionally he’ll wake earlier than that, but it’s usually after 6:10am.
Goes down for nap 1 at 9am, and I wake him at 10:30am. Goes down for nap 2 at 1:30pm; usually I wake him after 2 hours of sleep, sometimes he wakes on his own after 1.5 hours. He usually falls asleep in 5-10 calm minutes.
I put him to bed 3.75 hours after he wakes from nap 2, and he usually falls asleep within 10 calm minutes. Over the last few days, a few things have made me wonder if I need to increase this WT to 4 hours, but I won’t do that just yet.
My camera says he wakes up for 5-15 minutes a few times each night, but he is almost always quiet, and always falls back asleep on his own. I’ve checked the camera footage and he IS wiggly during the times it says he’s awake, but I’m not entirely sure if he’s actually awake or if it’s just an active part of his sleep cycle. This is one thing that makes me wonder if he needs a tiny bit more awake time during the day.
The other thing that makes me wonder is that just in the last few days, he’s had one or two earlier wakes (like 5:30am), so he might need a tiny bit more awake time in the day to keep him sleeping in until 6:30am. [One of the days, I went in to feed him (in the dark) at 6am, and he fell back asleep after just a few minutes. I snuggled him until 6:40 and proceeded as normal with the schedule. Other days, he wakes for 15-30 minutes, and then falls back asleep on his own.]
His schedule in waketimes is 2.5 / 3 / 3.75. His sleep works out to be about 3.5 daytime hours, 11 nighttime hours, and 14.5 hours total. This is amazing, because prior to the latest changes, I was struggling hardcore to get him to 11 hours of nightsleep! And yet now he is taking 11 night hours AND getting more day sleep than I was previously shooting for!
The change came when I finally deviated from my beloved 9&1 nap schedule; 9&1:30 is working beautifully and luckily it’s not too different from what I like. That change brought about a little more WT between his naps (3-hour WT rather than 2.75), and I also added more WT before bed (3.75 rather than 3.5). So basically, adding in more awake time fixed the nights. I had tried adding in more awake time in other ways in order to preserve my 9&1, but it just didn’t click until I allowed for the second nap to be pushed to 1:30pm.
The tricky thing is, sometimes he seems SO TIRED when it’s time for sleep, as though he has been stretched too long. He would most likely still fall asleep right away if I put him down 15 minutes earlier, and he might even still take long naps. The problem is that 5-6am timeframe, so I have to do these slightly longer waketimes throughout the day in order to push out early morning wakes.
But all in all, things are SO GOOD. Having a predictable sleep schedule is just INCREDIBLE. I missed it so much in the first 9 months with this kid 🤣