Isolde at 8 Months

Isolde turned 9 months one week ago so this is perhaps slightly overdue but I want to keep it for my records :)  9-month report can be found above!

   

At 8 months Isolde...

• started crawling tummy-style (not up on her hands and knees). She was very frustrated around 7½-8-months before she cracked it.

• started pulling herself up against the coffee table and tried to walk along it but was quite unsteady still. I wished then that we had that padded playpen at the Children's Library!
• was able to go to sleep without being breastfed, on oat cereal alone, but when I was home (most of the time) I'd nurse her before bedtime in addition to oats. I think she can benefit from mummy milk a while longer.
• slept 1930-2000 to 0500 but sometimes woke up at 02, 03 and/or 04.  This is still her routine at 9 months. Most nights it's easy to make her go back to sleep (after 1-5 minutes) but sometimes I have to revert to nursing here before 5am, if we've tried unsuccessfully for an hour or more to get her to fall asleep again.  If I feed her at 5 or 6am she sometimes nurses for 30-60 minutes and I doze off 50% of the time.  But then she's wide awake and wants to play.  So we're usually up from 6 or 7 am and then she (and usually I) sleep again from 9 for 1-1½ hours.  She sleeps again after lunch for 30-45 min, maybe an hour.
• had not shown any sign of separation anxiety or "only mummy will do".  She had a period of frustration around 7-8 months when she wanted me to play and be with her all the time but it felt it was more because she needed help to do things than she was afraid that I was going to disappear.
• first showed her love of raspberries!  Since they are so soft it's a great dessert/snack for her with no risk of choking!
• laughed a lot  - proper laughs and giggles. She played games with you, usually imitation of faces and shrieks, whereby she'd start and we'd imitate her and then she'd imitate us in turn.

• was really studying people, both adults and other children.  She'd crawl up to the other babies and stare at them, sometimes scaring a few by making some sort of sudden noise.  She'd also sit for a long time studying a toy; she seems like an investigative girl.
• she also started (or maybe it was even at a younger age) tilting her head to the side to get contact with another person, adult or child.  Very cute!

• got her first tooth.  Her first teeting experience was a couple of days of bad sleep.  I noticed on a Tuesday that she didn't want to eat crackers (smörgåsrån) and thought maybe a tooth was on the way but didn't see anything.  But the next day her lower gums were swollen and you could see one was definitely on the way.  The following day it was through and she could eat crackers and was sleeping much better again. This was around 8 months and 1 week.
• had another phase of blowing/spitting out her food when she was being fed, again not because she didn't like the food but because it's fun.
• loved the mirror (like all babies?) and found it curious that mum could be both in the mirror and next to her at the same time.
• liked the BabyBjörn a lot even though we don't use it very often at all since mum prefers the pram, which can be piled with lots of stuff!

• remained a calm and content person; she seems very even-tempered.
• still loved water and swimming.  She'd want to play with the water and touch the taps when washing her face and hands.

• had a few favourite books.  I thought she tried to close the book all the time but then I realised she tried to turn the pages.  But chewing on the books were second-best.