8 months

Here's Elias at 8 months (and 3 days) with the Guitar Hero guitar. Even three days into month nine, I'm having a hard time believing it's been over eight months since Elias was born. Time always goes by too fast, but it seems like we've been in fast forward since somewhere between six and seven months. Maybe it's because that was a sort of turning point for us, when both the reflux and sleep situations began to improve. Our days are a lot more predictable now than they were a couple of months ago and I suppose that makes the time seem to go a little faster as well. Either way, it's true what the adults are always saying. They really do grow up so fast. Here's a little video footage of Elias interacting with the guitar this morning.



It's a little long, but you can get a sense of how our mornings play out, crawling around the carpet in his nursery for hours at a time.

So what's new this month? Mainly, a continuation of what Elias was busy working on last month. He quickly moved from rolling over and figuring out how to get himself from his tummy to a seated position to crawling pretty well. It's amazing how quickly it happened. One week the sitting thing was new and by the next week he was getting himself from point A to point B without rolling over in order to do it. He's still a little wobbly and takes frequent sitting breaks and he's only escaped from the nursery into the kitchen a couple of times, but I have a feeling we'll need to be thinking more seriously about baby proofing this apartment by the weekend.


Mobility and teething are, I'm hoping, to blame for a few nights a week lately when we seem to take a step or two backward in the sleep department. It's still infinitely better than the dark days of late December and early January, but he has nights where it takes him a half-hour to settle down and/or a little more crying than usual and/or he wakes up once or twice in the middle of the night, usually settling himself back down within a couple of minutes but occasionally prompting one of us to go in and check on him. Last night, for example, we tried to get him to bed a little earlier than usual since he'd had a short and sort of early afternoon nap. He was obviously exhausted but it took him about an hour to finally fall asleep, from the time we first put him in his crib to the time he finally quieted down. Then he woke up crying around 1 a.m. I'm still not sure what woke him, but after a diaper change, an application of Orajel, and a little swaying with Mom, he was back asleep after only a couple minutes of fussing. I was surprised but grateful for that. I, on the other hand, took considerably longer to fall back asleep. It's amazing how quickly your body and mind forget what this night-waking thing is like.

Also contributing to these recent challenges, I'm sure, has been a bout of separation anxiety, which seems to be better the past week or so, perhaps because we spend a lot of our time playing peek-a-boo.


Perhaps Elias is starting to understand that when I walk out the door, I have not in fact disappeared completely.

On a positive note, I can finally feel the sharp edges of one of his top teeth as of this morning, which seem to have been coming in for a few days now, so hopefully this latest bout of teething will come to an end soon. It doesn't seem to be bothering him quite as much as the first set a couple of months ago, but it seems to be taking a bit longer. Otherwise, Elias has been doing a lot of babbling lately, initially making the "da da" sound and then just a couple of days ago introducing a long "mmmm" that eventually turned into "mmmmom" and then "ma ma." Over and over again. It's completely indiscriminate, of course, but exciting nonetheless. It makes me wonder, though, when do you count a combination of vowels and consonants as a first word? I'll try to get the babbling on video and post that shortly. In the meantime, I'll leave you with another short video I took this morning, as Elias crawls toward me to get his slobbery little hands on the camera.