8 months old

8 Months Old Today...

Wow. It really does go fast.
So, to the stats. These are from Oct. 27 (when he visited the doctor to check out his first nasty cold - which he is still recovering from):
Weight: 17lbs 16oz
Height: 28"

He only gained 3.5oz in 3 weeks (although today - when he went in for his follow-up flu shot I weighed him with clothes on at 18lbs 10oz) so he's definitely slowing down, but I guess that's normal the more active they become, and boy is he active! If we pop him on his blanket in the middle of the living room floor he will roll and roll around and get pretty much anywhere he wants. And it's quite clear that in the past few weeks it's not just aimless rolling, he'll spot something and move himself towards that either by rolling or by inch-worming on his butt and head (very uncomfortable looking). No crawling yet, but if you put him on his front with something just out of reach he'll try his best to stretch to reach it, I doubt crawling is far away.

He is also very interactive now, he loves to listen to you talk and watch you as you move around the room, he also babbles quite intelligently back at you. He understands permanency a little better now, if you take a toy away from him he'll complain loudly and look all around for it, and won't be appeased by a substitute. His hands are extremely dexterous and love to grab hold of the smallest part of any toy or blanket and fiddle with it. His pincer grip seems to be well-developed and he can pick up pretty much anything, no matter how small, so we have to be much more vigilant now!

The only real "problem" we've had is with food. He is absolutely refusing to eat any solids at all. It's been this way for about a month now, and while last weekend I was able to get a few spoonfuls of mushed banana in him, he generally just clamps his mouth and turns his head away at the hint of a spoon. Even his nanny, Carey - who has tons of experience feeding babies - can't get him to take solids. She recommended I start making my own as it was getting a bit expensive opening these jars of baby food and having to throw them out as he wasn't eating them. So I spent last weekend steaming all sorts of fruits and veggies and freezing them in little ice-cube trays. We've got a great assortment, peas, carrots, squash, bananas, pears, all in tiny portions ready to defrost and keep offering to Owen.

However, I was doing some research on feeding 8-month-olds and came across this really quite obvious concept of Baby-led weaning.

The idea is to allow the baby to control his or her solid food intake by self-feeding from the very beginning of the weaning process rather than using purees. It make sense when you consider that they recently changed the guidelines for introducing solids from 4 months to 6 months, if you had started solids with a 4 month old, by 6 months they'd be onto finger foods, so you may as well start right in with them. There's not a lot of info out there about it yet but I found some help from this great blog about baby-led weaning. It seems to be more popular in Britain. But, as he won't take purees I'll try anything!

Basically, the method involves giving baby foods in chip (chunky French-fry) shaped pieces, so that they can hold on to the food while exploring it with their mouths. The baby thinks it’s a toy and plays with it as a toy gradually realizing that they can chew and swallow it. The choking risk is considered to be minimal as the baby has control of what he is doing - rather than having a spoon shoved in to his mouth against his will. Apparently very little food actually goes in during the first few weeks of experimenting, but as they don't really need solids until 12 months for nutrition (I'll still be breast-feeding) that’s not a big concern. Hopefully this method will help promote a healthy attitude towards food, as right now I'm concerned about turning him against food entirely - feeding times are such a battle!

I plan on using my blog as a diary of our baby-led weaning successes/failures, so I'll post most days about his progress. Lets hope it’s swift, as now that I’m back at work and don’t have much time for relaxing my milk supply is dwindling!

Oh... and one other fabulous development is sleep. Owen goes to bed at around 6pm, wakes up around 11pm for some food and then sleeps all the way until 7am… sometimes I even have to wake him up! Wow! It’s not like this every night – we still have the occasional 2-3 times-a-night night, but in general it’s pretty consistent.