8 Months Old

Well, the child has survived to her eight month day. It must be because she's so dang cute, otherwise, I don't know. Our biggest issue at the moment is sleep. As I type this I'm listening to her screaming up in her room. I'm waiting for her to fall asleep for her nap. She's exhausted. She fell asleep while I was rocking her, but the very second I put her down, she woke up and started crying before I could even get out of the room. Super. Why can't I have one of those kids who sleep train themselves? Why does every single nap have to be a battle that I lose? I lose if I let her cry, because I have to listen to her cry. And she will cry, for hours, if I let her. I lose if I go get her up, because then she doesn't get a nap and I don't get a break, which equals both of us being very cranky. I lose if I go back up and rock her to sleep because she'll only sleep while I hold her, so she might get a nap but I get nothing done, and I can only do that if both of the boys are sleeping, which happens so close to never that it's not even worth thinking about. Lose, lose, lose. I love motherhood.

I wish I could say night time was better. It's not. She used to be really good at falling asleep on her own if I layed her down at just the right moment while she was still awake. Then she learned how to roll over. So now, if she's awake when I lay her down, she instantly rolls onto her back. She REFUSES to sleep on her back, but hasn't figured out how to roll back over onto her stomach (she can, she just won't). In order to keep her on her stomach, we swaddle her just like a newborn, with her arms down to her sides, so she can't roll over. She hates it. She cries. She cries no matter what. She's still waking up in the night, at least once, sometimes twice. If I feed her a bottle she'll usually go right back to sleep. But the pediatrician said we shouldn't be feeding her at night anymore. For awhile we tried having one of us get up and walk around with her. She'd be fine as long as she was being held, but as soon as we lay her down the crying begins. I got to the point where I couldn't take the hours of crying at night, nor the hours of interruptions to my sleep schedule. Aaron and I agreed that we could feed her water at night. That's working ok, we'll see how it goes.

Her constant crying wears on me quite a bit, and by night time my nerves are frazzled and my patience is shot. Sometimes in the middle of the night when I can't take it, I turn on the fan in our master bathroom and the dryer in the laundry room (which is between our bedroom and hers) and put my pillow over my head to try and drown her out. Then I feel like a horrible mother and the guilt keeps me from sleeping anyway.

She needs bigger socks, but I keep holding out for warmer weather in the hopes that I won't have to buy any. Just about the time I give in and buy them will be the time the sun decides to show itself.

Adelia isn't crawling yet, but she is getting better and better at scooting. She kind of looks like an inch-worm going across the carpet. It's pretty cute. When she gets excited she bobs her whole body up and down.

She still spits up a million times a day. She doesn't seem to care that we have nice carpet now, or that sometimes we are out in public,  or that most people, including myself, loathe the smell of baby spit up, especially now that she's eating solids.

On a more positive note, she is eating a lot better, and rarely fights the solids. We're still using stage one baby food, but I'm pretty sure she could handle stage two, and we'll probably switch to that once we run out of our stash of stage one. She seems to like pears, bananas, and squash the best so far. She doesn't really like peas. Is it just me, or have the flavors of baby food scrunk down to almost nothing? I can't seem to find anything but bananas, pears, apples, sweet potatoes, squash, carrots, and peas. I had to go to 3 different stores to find prunes and green beans. Odd, moving on...I gave her a pretzel rod for the first time the other day and she LOVED it. She made a ginormous mess with it, but it kept her happy for several minutes and allowed me to accomplish something in the kitchen, so I'd say it was a worthy mess. I'm a little hesitant with Adelia's foods, which is why it might seem like she doesn't eat very much for an 8 month old (by 8 months Lincoln had tried a lot of table food, for example), but I keep wondering if she'll have a milk allergy like Ivan. And if that's the case I want to stay away from a lot of processed foods (which are more likely to contain whey and casein) for the time being. Not sure what we'll do as far as introducing milk at her first birthday, but I have a few months to think about it.

So Adelia is 8 months old. Whenever I think about that, all that comes to mind is that she STILL hasn't been out of me longer than she was in me. And then I come to the conclusion that 9 months is a long time. And that pregnancy is not something I will willingly sign myself up for again any time soon.

Could three children be enough for me? I'd always pictured us with a bigger family than that. I guess we'll just have to see. But today the odds are definitely not in favor of a big family.