Stats
Size 3 diapers
Mostly wearing 6-9 month clothing, but 9m stuff fits best.
18.6 pounds (30%) & 28.5 inches (55%) [[no idea what’s going on with his height/weight. He weighs the exact same as last month, and I actually measured him as shorter than last time, so at least one of the times I didn’t do something right 🤪]]
Notable events
His first Christmas! And I meant to get him a gift of some sort, but I never actually did 😬 He had some items in his stocking like socks, shoes, and diapers, but literally I did not get him a single gift to play with 😱 At least he had fun playing with wrapping paper and trying to chew on everyone else’s presents 🤣
Tricks/Milestones
He started crawling just days after he turned 8 months, and is now ALL OVER THE PLACE. Can’t keep him out of my ONE plant 🤣
Got his first two (bottom) teeth right at 9 months. He is the first kid that I’ve been able to tell he was legitimately teething (both due to behavior and the look of his gums).
He’s been saying “mama” A LOT. Always seems to be when he’s sad haha.
Reaches up when we reach down to pick him up.
Favorite things
He is very interested in picking up tiny specks (usually of garbage). He was doing this more at the beginning of the month, but he still goes for the small items. When he was doing it a lot, I HAD to wear a shirt when nursing because otherwise he would always try to grab the freckles on my neck area! 🤣
He also likes to grab my hair when he’s nursing, which is why my hair is still usually in a ponytail or messy bun 5-6 days/week.
Any new water bottle he sees, he wants to play with. They’re the best “toys”! 🤣
Random tidbits
It doesn’t look it, but he does actually have a lot of hair, it’s just so light that it’s hard to see. He has little “wings” that I’m always tucking under his ears, and I’m just itching to cut it again.
Pete definitely has the most sensitive skin of any of my babies. He’s always seemed to have some eczema, but it’s gotten a lot worse now that we’re in the dry winter. I have to keep his stomach covered as much as possible, because he’s always trying to scratch it if it gets exposed! Diaper changes are one of the only times his stomach is exposed, so I always have to give him a toy to hold to keep his hands busy!
His sisters are still obsessed with him. They love to hug and kiss him and help sing his bedtime song, and they’ve even started to actually play together more, now that Pete is on the move. Ada likes to put a doll shirt on top of Pete’s head so that the sleeves look like dog ears 🤣
He generally nurses 4x/day — when he wakes, after nap 1, after nap 2, and right before bed. In the morning, he nurses for 15-20 minutes; every other time it’s more like 5 minutes. Occasionally I’ll nurse him another time if he seems to be hungry. He eats table food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and he eats quite a bit. He likes pretty much every food so far.
Sleep
I’ve been actively tweaking his schedule for FIVE months now, and literally nothing I do fixes his nights (which have had issues for the last 6-8 weeks since I dropped his nightfeed).
I get him out of bed at 6:30am. In the off chance he’s still sleeping (typically only happens if he had a long waking in the 3am hour), I wake him at this time.
Goes down for nap 1 at 9am, and I wake him at 10:15am. Goes down for nap 2 at 1pm; sometimes I wake him after 2 hours of sleep, sometimes he wakes after 1.5 hours, and occasionally he wakes after less than 1.5 hours. He usually falls asleep in 5-10 calm minutes.
I’ve tried SO many things for bedtime to try to address the night/early morning issues. 3.5 hours. 3.75 hours. 6:30pm no matter what. 6:45pm no matter what. And other things along the way that were less consistent. Pretty much no matter when I put him to bed, he falls asleep within 10 calm minutes.
His nights are all over the place. He usually wakes 2-3x for ~10 minutes each (calm), but sometimes for 20-30 minutes. Sometimes he cries out briefly in the night. Usually he wakes up around 5:30am (doesn’t matter whether I put him to bed at 6pm, 7pm, or anything in between). Sometimes he wakes more like 3:30am, calm or crying, and falls back asleep on his own an hour later. Sometimes he wakes at 3:30am, calm at first, then crying after a while. Sometimes I decide to feed him at an extra early (3am hour) or early (5am hour) wakeup, and sometimes I don’t. Looking at this, you might think, “well the problem is that you’re inconsistent!” But I’ve consistently tried things for many days or even weeks at a time, and the nights still look so random when compared with each other. And after working on Pete’s sleep in one way or another for 5 months, I’m honestly just burned out and sick of consistency at this point, so I do whatever feels right in the moment.
What I’m shooting for is
6:00am awake, 6:30 out of crib
9am down, 9:15-10:15am nap 1
1pm down, 1:15-3:15pm nap 2
6:45pm down, 7pm asleep
or possibly 7pm down, 7:15pm asleep, 6:15am awake. (11 night/3 day = 14 hours total sleep, & 10 hours total awake time.) But clearly that night portion isn’t working out.
When I weighed him and saw that he weighed exactly the same as last month, I wondered if maybe his sleep is still off because he’s not getting enough to eat. Like I mentioned earlier, he doesn’t nurse very long throughout the day; plus he seems so thirsty at mealtimes, so maybe he wakes in the early morning because he’s not getting enough daily calories/nutrients from his milk feeds? But I’m not sure because it’s not like he consistently wakes a certain number of hours after going to sleep — he consistently wakes around 5:30 regardless of when he went to sleep. So food probably isn’t the issue, but I’ve been giving him more table food at mealtimes the last two days and he has eaten more when it’s offered.
All in all, naps are great, and nights aren’t HORRIBLE, but it’s just so emotionally taxing to continue to be woken at 5:30am every day and not knowing what I can do to fix it. I’ve heard that some babies can’t clock more than 11 hours of night sleep, but in the last few weeks as I’ve been more closely monitoring how much sleep he gets, he never even gets 11 hours! And last month, I was letting his day sleep go longer (probably around 3.5-4 hours), but even since limiting it to 3-3.25 hours, he still won’t sleep a solid 11 hours through the night. I’m feeling a lot of despair around his sleep. It’s hard, man.
