11 months...

Oh, my word.  One month to go before my baby boy turns a year old.  I can't hardly take it...

We had to lower Deacon's crib mattress at the beginning of this month -- he started to like standing up in his crib and that was just not okay with me.  He was too much in danger of leaning too far over so we dropped the mattress down a couple levels.

We continued to try new foods like broccoli & carrots with cheese, lasagna and apples w/oatmeal (all baby food) and Deacon is not too big a fan.  About a week before he turned 11 mos, we started trying to give him some table food from our dinner -- baked spaghetti, french toast w/bacon, real sweet potatoes, baked beans and peaches...he does pretty well with it all.  My fear of him choking is fading.  :\  We've also begun to introduce whole milk as my supply of breastmilk continues to wane.  As it stands right now, this is what his feeding schedule looks like:

an 8 oz bottle first thing in the morning (whole milk, breastmilk, formula or combo of the 3)

some rice cereal and yogurt for a mid-morning snack or "breakfast"

an 8 oz bottle for lunch

some goldfish, cheerios or puffs and water for snack

dinner with "the fam" (table food from whatever we're eating)

an 8 oz bottle before bed

Since we're talking about his feeding schedule, I'll just mention here that I stopped nursing Deacon at the end of this month.  I had planned to try to nurse through his 1st year and I think we probably would've made it (I had gotten down to just nursing him first thing in the morning by this month) but I went away for a weekend retreat the end of Sept/first of Oct and rather than take the pump with me just for that one feeding, I thought it was time to just be done altogether.  He did great, of course.  He's so easy-going.  :)  I had a little trouble for about 6-7 days with pain & discomfort but within about 10 days I was done with all of that.

[if I'm working on loading or unloading the dishwasher,

he's right there, with his "Dr. Seuss hair"...]

Of course, he's crawling everywhere now.  I mentioned in my last post that he'd finally begun to pull up on everything and was crawling intermittently.  Well, he's really been doing great, getting more fluid and taking less time to get where he's going.  He will crawl right up to me or Jeff where we're standing, grab a hold of our pant legs and stand right up.  It's so endearing -- I just love it!

crawling!

Our boy is crawling!  Yes, it's been a few weeks in the making and some might say he's a little behind the curve, but I've said it before and I'll say it again: I have not been rushing Deacon into anything related to mobility, knowing that once he got the hang of it, it would be GAME ON.

Thankfully, he's still learning and exploring so he's not "gone in 2 seconds" once he starts, but he gets to where he wants to go in due time and he's just fine with that for now.  He is so cute crawling around here, pulling up on things, looking around from his new 2.5 foot perspective.  :)

I love to watch him.

You might, too:

As you can see, he's still perfecting it, but he's much improved even in the short time between when we took this video a week ago and now.  This video is a good depiction of his love affair with his pacifier, but now he'll crawl to both me and Jeff and to basically anywhere that grabs his attention (i.e., the kitchen, specifically the back door/curtains or the trash can *sigh*, the entertainment center with all the buttons to push *siiigh*, the coffee table where there are so many magazines and a flower vase to get into *siiiiiiigh*).

Our house is SO.NOT.childproof.

But I did put in the outlet covers a couple of weeks ago and I'm just playing the "move it before he can break it or hurt himself with it" game right now.  A cross between putting all MY stuff up/away for him -- something I would like to refrain from in certain capacities -- and having all of MY stuff messed up by my 10.5 month old, also something I'd like to avoid.  :\  I'm hoping to find some middle ground in there.

I hear all you mommies laughing at me.  Go ahead.  You all had to figure out what your happy medium was and so do I.  Here's to finding it before everything is destroyed or my son pokes his eye out!

[btw, he started wearing shoes this week -- SO adorable.Just like his shorts.]   [mobility = fun little forbidden places to find,like Daddy's computer desk]    

mobility 101

No, Deacon is not crawling yet and that's cool with me.  However, he is definitely getting closer and closer to figuring it all out.

He's been standing for a long, long time now -- he'll stand ALL.DAY.LONG.  Earlier this month we started standing him up at the coffee table, ottoman, edge of the couch, etc., and he likes that.  They are just his height and he'll stand there without support forever.

He will actually take a few (very slow) steps if he's standing up, you're holding his hands and he wants to move over to where you are.  That's with support, though.  Without anyone's help, just in the last few weeks or so, he has been perfecting his pilates moves.  :)  He does a mean "plank":

It's so neat to watch him -- how he rolls onto his tummy, gets his feet under him and pushes up.  Then he hangs out there for a minute, looking around.  You can almost see the wheels turning in his head..."now how do I get from here to there?"

The next thing he started doing was putting his right knee back down on the floor, kind of underneath his body, but he keeps his left leg straight so he ends up just back on his tummy again.  And he scoots or rolls to wherever he needs to go.

Just recently, because he now puts that right knee in and down on the floor, he can turn himself to a sitting position.  So he can now sit himself up from his tummy.  That was really exciting when Jeff and I saw him do that the other night for the first time. 

*sigh* He's getting to be such a big boy...

10 months...

Here we are, another month milestone.  Can't believe my little guy is 10 months old already!  This year is flying by too, too fast!

I have a feeling that won't be the last time I say that.

We had another big month with the foods.  We are trying pretty much anything we can get our hands on.  He's in the 3rd Foods stage (by Gerber) -- jars that hold a little more quantity.  Some new things we tried this month:

a banana fruit medley

apricot

pear & mango

We also tried giving him some meat for the first time toward the end of the month.  He's not a fan of the chicken noodle dinner.  It's fairly chunkier than he's used to and has lots of herbs in it.  We've tried it several times and so far he's not coming around.  He IS still eating a lot of the same veggies he's been eating: sweet potatoes, squash, mixed veggies, etc.

We also gave him "puffs" for the first time this month.  You may or may not be familiar with this little crunchy concept that dissolves fairly quickly when the baby puts them in his mouth.  It's a good way to get them used to that kind of texture in their mouth, and it also helps them practice their motor skills with their fingers.  You can do the same thing with Cheerios (surprisingly, they dissolve fairly quickly, too), and we did.  But we have more flavors in the puffs, so we do both.

He did pretty good.  It took some practice because to begin with, he would get it to the back of his tongue and then start to gag a little bit, not quite sure what to do with it (swallow or spit it out).  But practice makes perfect, they say, so we're doing that throughout the day, here and there.  And he's getting better.  At picking them up, and at eating them.  :)

We also tried giving him baby yogurt for the first time this month.  He likes that stuff!  Our grocery store carries the Yo-Baby brand and we've tried the peach and the blueberry flavors of those.  He likes both.  Jeff also picked up a bulk pack of baby yogurt at Sam's (may have been Gerber brand) that has peach, banana and strawberry flavors, and Deacon likes all of those, too.  We've started substituting his morning meal at 10am, which used to be breastmilk, with a couple tbsp of rice cereal mixed with water and the yogurt.  We've been doing that for about the last 3 weeks now and it's working for us.  It's like giving him breakfast so we're working toward that transition to 3 meals a day.

I'll be honest with you, though: when it comes to changing his schedule in some way, or adding something new in, it's hard on me.  I don't know if any of the other mamas go through that, but it's tough for me.  I get pretty used to the schedule as it is and then the next "stage" just throws me for a loop!   Such a learning experience for both (all) of us...

One other thing we've done this month in the meal department is tried giving Deacon a sippy cup for the first time.  We have a sippy cup with a soft, silicone spout and we're just giving him water in it for now.  He seems to be doing okay with it.  We offer it at random times during the day, mainly when he's eating his "breakfast" (the cereal and yogurt) and when he's having a snack (the puffs or Cheerios).  He does drink a little bit of the water and then sometimes he plays with the cup.  We have cups that don't have handles on the sides, but I think I'd like to get one that does have handles and see how he does with it.

Most everyone reading this will be aware of the hurricane we had blow through here last week, the first hurricane of this season, Irene.  Well, that was Deacon's first hurricane!  Of course, nothing was different for him.  We stayed here and just prepared ourselves for what could come.  He had no trouble sleeping through the wind and rain that Friday night/Saturday morning that the storm came ashore.  Our work offices closed around noon that Friday so we just spent the day hanging out, taking (and uploading) cell phone photos of the storm around our house, waiting for and wondering if our power would go out.  It never did.  In fact, we fared really well through the storm as compared to other areas around us.  Praise the Lord for that.

This was pretty much the extent of our "hurricane party":

Deacon does have a couple more tricks but I'll be posting about those in a separate post soon.  I've written enough in this post about my sweet boy, right?  :)  You know I could just go on and on...

We did weigh Deacon at the end of this month and he is now 19.5 lbs.  Up 3 lbs in 4 months.  I was kinda thinking that he would weigh more than that by now.  He seems like a little chunk to me but then when I see him up against other kids his age, he's on the small side. 

Regardless of his weight, height, head circumference, or whatever else they want to measure, he's my perfect little doodle.  :)

1st boat ride...

Deacon got to take his first boat ride a few weeks ago.  Since we live on the coast, we have friends who own boats, several of which are in our Connect Groups at church.  We decided to plan a little outing one Saturday morning and that became Deacon's first experience on a boat.

I don't have too many photos to show the boat ride because, of course, once you get going, you're moving.  :)  But we did get one of our cutie in his life jacket:

We borrowed the jacket from a friend who has a son a month older than Deacon.

Once we got all our gear loaded in the boats, we headed across the Intracoastal Waterway to Figure 8 Island.  This is a perfect place for the little ones because there is a beach for us to hang out on, but there are no waves (unless a boat comes by and we get a few from their wake).  The day we went out, we had quite a bit of shallow water for the kids to play in; it was perfect for Deacon.

He really enjoyed being in the water -- never once whined or whimpered like he does when we try the water at the beach.  Guess it really is the waves.  And hopefully he'll get over that with time.

9 months...

Wow, 9 months already.  3/4 of year.  *sniff*

Well, this month it was all about the food!  We finally got past the "solids strike", as I was calling it.  The turning point, I would say, came right around the middle of the month when Deacon tried squash.  Don't know what it was about the squash but he loved it and ate the whole container!

Well, after that it was on!  We revisited carrots the next night and he ate them all.  Then we tried sweet potatoes again and he ate the whole container of those.  I was a happy mama.  :)

But it didn't stop there.  Since then, we've been giving him bananas, pears, peas, mixed vegetables, green beans, apple-blueberry, peaches, apple-strawberry-banana.  With the exception of the peas and green beans, he's been eating everything all gone.  The peas and the green beans...well, I kinda don't blame him for not eating those.  :]

We had another couple of big deals happen this month -- we finally saw Deacon roll over!  Just a few days after he started eating his solids really well, I saw him roll over with my own eyes.  I know that he'd been rolling over because I would leave him laying one way and when I came back into the room, he'd be laying the opposite.  Little stinker would wait until I left the room to do his tricks.  :)  But I finally saw him do it one day and I was so excited!

[this cracks me up: he's watching Jay-Jay on Daddy's phone...]

Since then he'll roll over if he's trying to get to something or just not paying attention to what he's doing, but he's not a "roly-poly" by any means.  We do have to watch where we put him now so he doesn't roll off the couch/loveseat or bed.  And he's ALL.OVER.THE.PLACE. in his crib!  My goodness, that boy can get around in that crib, with the sides to help him push off.  You never know how he's going to end up!

Deacon also learned to clap his hands this month!  About a week after I saw him roll over he started clapping one day.  I can't even tell you how excited I was about that.  More excited than I thought I would be!  I mean, it's just clapping, for pete's sake.  But for me, I think I see it as the first step to him being able to communicate something to us.  Right now, he's not really using clapping to communicate yet because he does it at pretty random times, not necessarily when he's happy, and not always when he hears music or something.  But soon we'll be able to see his clapping as a sign of happiness or contentment or playfulness or whatever it turns into.  And THAT is exciting to me.  :)

[Deacon with his great Gram & Buppa, 9 mos]

2nd beach trip...

We took Deacon back to the beach yesterday.  He is so dang cute in his little bathing suits and sunglasses, I can hardly stand it, ya'll. :)  He loves being outside so for the most part he likes the beach.

The sand part of the beach, anyway...

Considering it was a bit warmer this time, we had high hopes that he would enjoy the water/waves more, but no.  It was not to be...

It sure ain't for lack of tryin', though!

The tide was going out so we had lots of shallow waters for Jeff to walk him out in but he was definitely NOT a fan of being any closer to the water.  I could hear him whining from back where I was taking photos... :\

So we brought him back and I sat with him a little bit in the sand, right where the water would only come up just every so often...

He still kept an eye on those waves.  :)

We took him back up to where our chairs were after a bit and just sat him in the sand.  Jeff found a large enough shell that had all worn, rounded edges for Deacon to chew on.

The first couple of times he dropped it I rinsed it off for him.  It was a lost cause.  He left with a mouthful of sand.  Yick.