10 Months: Crawling!

10 months and eight teeth!



Today Mr. Delicious is 10 months delectable! He's finally crawling, finally has a high chair (actually a booster seat Wendy recommended), and loves to climb and stand with the support of furniture, and chatters and pseudo-sings! He feeds himself Cheerios and pieces of fruit, but is still working to coordinate chewing and swallowing. He's also starting to wave! And he loves to get into things and scrape his nose!

 

Safety 1st Deluxe Snack and Go Booster seat is a great high chair and will grow with him...for only $26!

 Crawling!

He's happy and oh-so smiley. I think we're over the hump of painful teething, but unfortunately, his sleeping has only marginally improved. Where once he was sleeping 10-11 hours a night, he started waking up twice a night in fits since we moved in the house, which coincided with his top four teeth and an additional bottom two coming in. But in the last week or so, he's been sleeping a lot better. However, we've developed a bad habit of picking him up to console him and also taking him to our bed to sleep with us now, even though he is only getting up once a night. Must stop that!

They say it was the nine month sleep regression where multiple teeth (he has eight now!) come in at once and babies are cognitively more alert, that makes them wake up. In desperation to get him to sleep, I'd rock him, whereas I should have put him in to his crib a little bit awake. Well, I read somewhere that by eight months, they really prefer to fall asleep in the crib rather than in your arms. So in the past couple nights, that's what I did. After his routine of bath and bottle, I'd put him down and stay with him, resting my hand on his back. And it works! He falls asleep after a few minutes of flopping around, trying to find a comfortable position, but without wailing. The key is to make the environment extra comfortable, so now I leave his bathroom light on dim (instead of turning out all the lights), give him a blanket (he's old enough now--but I wouldn't recommend it for young babies), and turn on his sound machines (Sleep Sheep and Giraffe). This has helped my own back immensely, since I don't have to walk around with him to lull him to sleep.

But he's in the habit of waking up early morning around 4:00 or 4:30, which isn't bad since we get up at 5:00. But we'd take him into our room for that precious additional 30 minutes to an hour and he goes back to sleep, and we eventually have to wake him.

I've read that feeding babies carbs (as opposed to sugar and protein) before bed helps to increase their melatonin levels and thereby fall asleep. And that's just what we've done, feeding him cereal and bananas. It seems to work, and the result is his sleeping until 4:00-4:30 rather than midnight after being put to bed at 7:00. (And yes, we've also been trying to put him to bed earlier, as well, which seems to help.)

Hopefully by next month, he'll be back to sleeping 10 hours. He's so much fun and has a great personality--very mellow!