Forest at 11 Months

Another month down! Only a month left until his birthday!

• Food: Forest’s eating took a hit the first week of the month. He was still devouring his food right when we arrived in Port Aransas but he had a mild stomach bug before we all got hit with the bigger stomach bug, and paired with being in a new place, his solids intake went down to nil until we returned home to a normal routine. He has continued to eat the food I buy at the store but over the last few weeks we’ve tried going the yogurt puffs more often and he’s been eating them mostly with ease. He’s even biting them in pieces and will take his time with them.

  A few weeks ago I had a coupon for some Gerber containers, which I of course forgot to even use when I checked out. I picked up some that had chunks of food in them so he could start working on his texture more. It took him several tries at daycare before he started getting used to it and now I can feed him that without him freaking out about the chunks. I still take it easy, giving him just one bite that has a chunk in it instead of a bite with several chunks. I can easily see him either chewing it or smashing it on the roof of his mouth with his tongue before he swallows. I’m so glad that is going better now!

  Recently we started noticing random food notes on his daily daycare sheets that did not pertain to the food he was sent to daycare with. At first it was the yogurt puffs which didn’t bother me since we’d been trying to give him those for awhile. Then I noticed crackers. What had been happening was that as the teachers were feeding some of the others his age chunkier table food Forest had shown interes. They had tried giving him bits of that to see how he did. Seeing as he’s had so much texture and gagging issues we were definitely concerned. The crackers turned out to be Ritz crackers and he had handled them well but I ended up talking to one of the managers about the situation because we wanted to be informed before new food was tried. I had tried earlier in the month a few more times with pieces of food but none really made it into his mouth, however it sounds like he is showing a renewed interest in it. I guess it is time to try that again!

  As for how much food Forest is eating during the day, he’s typically eating 1.5-2 jars at daycare and then 1/4-3/4 of a jar in the evening with us. Sometimes he’s just cranky and we don’t bother giving him food, or we attempt it and he protests the moment he gets put in the highchair so I just have extra nursing sessions instead.

  Not necessarily related to food but in the same realm is sippy cups. He had pretty much never taken to the sippy cups we’d bought months ago but had liked the old-school Tupperware one, however he dribbled quite a bit with that one. I was at Dollar General recently getting other random household items and decided to see what they had. I ended up buying one sippy cup and another straw sippy cup. That’s been a little over a week ago and he has really taken to both of them. It took Forest a little longer to figure out the straw cup but now that he’s got it figured out he gets excited for it! Score for some random cup that isn’t on some ‘Best Of’ list for babies! Isn’t that how it always goes?

• Nursing:
  Not much has changed nursing wise. We still nurse every 2-3 hours when we’re together or on demand. As I am coming up on my one year goal of breastfeeding I cannot fathom weaning him yet. At this point I will continue letting it be his choice to wean and follow his lead. I hesitate to set a goal after one year but if I did I’d do them in six month stints. The only downside is still needing to pump at work. Since he has sort of dropped a bottle, if not two, during the day I may stretch out my sessions at work and pump twice at work and once before work instead of thrice a work and once before work. The two afternoon sessions are 2 hours apart whereas the rest are typically 3 hours apart. I don’t know. We’ll see how he continues with his solids and if he starts dropping any other feedings. I need to read about navigating this issue, how other women do it without losing their supply totally. *I did end up reading about it and this is what folks do, slowly drop pumping sessions as time goes on.*

  I need to look into donating more milk very soon.

• Sleeping:
  Alright. My one word of advice to other parents or future parents or ANYONE…never, ever, ask if someone’s child is sleeping through the night. My apologies if I ever asked that question to anyone pre-Forest. It has to be one of the most frustrating questions for a parent of a baby and/or toddler to get. It’s the easiest way to throw some guilt onto the receiving party, intentional or not (usually not). Sure, there are all sorts of guidance that says by such and such age or weight they are capable of sleeping through the night, which I’ll be honest to all of us that have a child that doesn’t ‘sleep through the night’, it sounds like total b.s. That said, Forest kinda/sorta *does* sleep through the night. He just gets up to nurse, which is still totally normal for breastfed babies to be doing. Aside from a few random times he’s decided to ‘wake-up’ at 5am only to fall back asleep at 6am, he generally sleeps ‘through the night’.

  What people fail to realize is that sleep changes constantly with babies…unless you are just a lucky parent with a kid who has never had a problem going to sleep and staying asleep. Things may be great for a few weeks with Forest and then I get a week of random stuff that is just ridiculous, like what he’s been doing lately—protesting bedtime. And it isn’t even protesting, he will get kind of to sleep while nursing and I think he’s good to lay down in the crib but he immediately wakes up and cries and then sits up and stares at me like I’m the worst person ever! And then he’s awake—there’s no nursing back to sleep. Sometimes I sit with him on the bed where he plays drunken-sleepy baby—sits up and then falls over on his side/belly/back, mumbles something, rolls over, hits his head with his hand in an act of soothing, and squiggles about. This can go on for 30 minutes or longer until I finally just give up and we go downstairs and he plays or watches a cartoon and I try to get something done. Chris has tried his hand at this sleep thing a few times but for the most part I’m the person Forest associates with bedtime.

  He’s still sleeping in his pack and play upstairs with us and a lot of the time (ok, like most of the time) he ends up in bed with us after a certain point at night. I just fall asleep while he nurses and the next thing you know it’s hours later. I’d like to work on him sleeping in his crib downstairs, and I have in recent months, just not lately. I don’t forsee him being in his crib consistently until he stops nursing often at night—which is who knows when. The times I have put him in his crib I was still getting up several times a night. It’s just easier to walk across the room instead of downstairs.

  So, sleep…be flexible and try not to lose your patience! Sometimes that doesn’t always work and there are tears from everyone. I know some day I will miss all of the cuddles and the time nursing him to sleep.

• Developmental Stuff:
  July was a month of developments! He had started pulling himself up in June and that’s just continued escalating further in July. He searches anything out that he thinks he can use to pull himself up. He’s not quite got the leg strength yet for trying to walk or standing on his own so I’m not sure if he will be walking by his birthday or not. That was my original estimation but now I’m not so sure. Who knows, a light bulb could go off in his brain one week (cue one of those crazy weird sleep weeks—that’s when developmental stuff likes to happen) and I might have a walking toddler on my hands!

  With the walking he’s started navigating in his walker a lot better. It used to be that he’d walk into things and get stuck but now he just takes off around the house making a beeline for things that he can get himself into trouble with, such as the bookshelf with the cookbooks. He can reverse and turn and really steer that walker like nobody’s business!

  Also in the last week he decided that he was going to start crawling-crawling instead of army crawling. Chris and I noticed one day that he took a few more crawls than he usually did when he got up on his knees and we were all amazed. Then a few days later he just went forward with a crawl, got down on his belly again, and kept alternating that until now I think he’s probably abandoned that army crawl for the most part. I really didn’t think he was going to be a full on crawler!

  Oh, I may have mentioned in the June post, or maybe not, but Chris started teaching him how to do the stackable rings sometime in June. He has gotten *really* good at it and you can just hand him a ring and he’ll slide it on with no problem. He will sit there and entertain himself with that for awhile, taking the rings off and repeating it. He does try to put other things onto the pole that are definitely not going to fit or work! I got out the shape game where you stick the shapes into the same shaped hole but we haven’t worked with him on that much so far. Right now he just likes to chew on the shapes.

  I can definitely tell his cognitive functions are getting sharper by the day!

  *And one more thing*…I always think of these things after I get a post written…I forgot that I taught him how to clap on the drive up to Dallas a few weeks ago. Now he does it all the time! It’s so cute!

• Health:
  Aside from a little stomach bug earlier in the month he’s only had a mild cold that he got at the tail end of July. I noticed some snotty babies in his class at daycare and knew that we’d be facing that later in the week. Sure enough…now I’m getting it! Oh, daycare!

  He’s got 7 teeth right now, with his top incisors breaking through the gums quite well. All in all July was a good month for him health wise. I hope it stays that way for a long while!

Here’s some more photos and videos from the month!