8 Months with Ellie!

Changes/Developments
Ellie has mastered sitting on her own.  The nice thing about this is now she can be in a regular stroller without her infant seat, which gives her more space and allows us to adjust the incline.  I have had her in the front of a shopping cart now and that makes doing errands a lot easier than putting her in a carrier or using the click n go type stroller with limited basket space.  She loves to look at everything going on in the supermarket and smile at people.  

She is definitely a happy baby.  She loves when we give her raspberries on her tummy and can make the raspberry sound herself. Several times a day we get great coos and belly laughs which are amazing. She is rarely in a bad mood and usually only cries when we put her in her car seat and she doesn't want to be in it.  She will whimper if we put her down on her mat and she wants to be carried instead.  She has taken up whimpering when she is unhappy about what is going on. 

She can sit and play on her own for a bit on her mat with her toys, but she prefers to be with people playing or being carried around facing out.  

She loves to play on the grass and tries to stick the grass in her mouth.  She is drooling a lot now, but still no teeth poking through.  Her babbling has increased and now she makes sounds like "mamamama" but it isn't the "true" mama that i am looking for, because she isn't referring to me when she makes these sounds. She still loves making loud noises just because she can/wants to see how loud her voice can get.  

Sleep
She is still waking up once per night to eat, usually between 3-4:30 am.  Occasionally she goes until 5:30 am, but not usually.   It isn't too terrible, because usually I just nurse her and she goes back to sleep and I go back to sleep, but sometimes I can't get back to sleep and that kind of stinks.

Feeding
We are still breastfeeding as her predominant method of food, but she gets 2-3 solids in a day.  We have started giving her puffs and mum-mum crackers as well and she is doing good getting things into her mouth.  She is eating a lot more of the pureed foods than the first few weeks when she was just starting out with solids.   Her pop has changed over from being that nice not too smelly breastfed only poop to being solid older baby type poop. 

Mama Stuff

Now that Ellie is sitting up on her own I have started taking her on runs in the jogging stroller.  This is great because previously I could only go for runs when Brian was around to watch her.  Now I can just take her with me, so I am getting in a lot more runs.  It is a lot of work to push her uphill in the jogging stroller, but it makes for a good workout!

We haven't been on any far away trips lately, but we did a few fun things this month:

Cape Cod for the 4th of July


Watched daddy's triathlon and wore my track suit
 
Picnic in the park
 
Fire truck day in town

 
Day trip to Boston



And this one is just plain cute