9 Months Today...8 Month Low Down

Today is LL's 9 Month Birthday --Here's Her 8 Month Low Down 

Bedtime: Between 7:30 & 8:00 pm.  She is getting SO much better with sleeping.  After putting her down for the night, she usually wakes up about 2 hours later for a bottle and then will sleep for 7-8 hours straight.  Can I get a woot-woot?

Wake-Up: Lately she has gotten into the habit of waking around 4:30am.  At first, I didn't think anything of this because she was finally sleeping for 7 hours straight and I was so THANKFUL to be getting solid sleep.  But, now I need to think about how to break this. Hmmm?  

Naps: I think she is trying to transition into 2 naps a day.  She'll take her first nap between 8:30-9:00 and it's approx 1 1/2 hours.  Her second nap is around 12:30-1:00 and usually 1 1/2 hours. Her naps have finally gotten so much longer.  For SO long her naps were only 30-45 min long.  Man, I love turning this new sleep corner.

Bottles: She usually gets about 5 bottles a day.  I've been making them about 6 oz. to see if she'll drink more.  She was only drinking about 4 oz at a time.  She's getting better.

Nursing: NO MORE.  She was done at 7 Months.

Foods:  She has been eating so much better.  We found out that the Chiobani Yogurt she as eating was giving her a lot of gas and we think it was keeping her up at night.  As soon as we stopped giving her that, she stated sleeping better.  Coincidence?  who knows.  She eats some 3rd stage foods, and every time I give her a bite of my baked potato or sweet potato, she makes a horrible face and spits it out.  She only eats 1 1/2 containers of  stage 2 foods.  She's just not a big eater.

New foods this month: Gerber Wagon Wheel Finger foods/ Carrot and Apple flavor

Night Time:
She was sleeping with us at night just because we were both so sick of getting up 4 times a night to walk to her crib. So much easier to turn over and pat her back to sleep.  But for the last 2 weeks, she's been sleeping like a freakin' champ in her crib.  7-8 hours of solid sleep.  Like I said before, we stopped giving her the yogurt and she started sleeping better.  We even experimented one  night to see if that was really bothering her...and sure enough the day we gave her the yogurt, she was up off and on all night.

Developmental Milestones & Firsts:
It has been a slow month for milestones.  It seems that all of them hit at once last month.  I thought for sure she would have gotten her top two teeth, but they're not here yet.  Lots of drooling and I think I see them coming down.  She's walking a lot between furniture, along the walls and when we hold her hands.  Not sure if that means she'll be walking soon.  We got her a few "walking" toys that she seems to like.

Momma's Mental State:
It's amazing what sleep will do to your mental state.  For the first 8 months of Avery's life I was so sleep deprived and had the worst dark circles.  I pray very hard that Avery keeps up the great sleeping and that it only gets better.
There are 2 things that I was completely naive about and didn't give 2 thoughts about while pregnant....Infant sleep and recovery "down there".  Both things knocked me for a major loop.  I'm so glad both are behind us. knock on wood