On 7-27-13 Jensen turned 7 months old.
I have been putting off writing this post for a while for multiple reasons, but one of them was because I didn't know how to explain this past month with Jensen and I.... Lets just say that it was the best and worst month of his life thus far. He was the cutest, sweetest, thing ever! He learned so many new things and yet we struggled a little bit. Nothing major. He didn't have colic and he didn't even cry that much he just wasn't doing things as I had come to predict. I actually had to pay attention to his signs and try and read what he was trying to tell me (not an easy task). But lets start with the good things-
A week after we got home from vacationing this kid learned to army crawl. He couldn't sit up, but he could crawl and he just took off. I felt like I hardly saw him for days on end because he was off exploring the house. Luckily our house is baby proof so except for the crumbs on the kitchen floor he was pretty safe to explore at will. I was actually really disappointed when he learned to crawl. I had been looking forward to a few months of him just sitting still in one spot and playing with toys, but no such luck here.
Finally a few weeks later he learned to sit up. He still preferred to be on his stomach for easy movement, but he could do it.
He learned to rock himself in his carseat. I am pretty sure a few of my cousins knew how to do this because I was not that surprised when he would do it, but we got a million comments for others around us whenever he would do it about how cool/cute it was. He got pretty good and could keep it rocking for quite a while and then he would cry when he would get tired of kicking his legs. It was often how we made it through sacrament meeting for a few weeks. But like with all things kids learn they do it a ton for a while and then over time just stop and don't really ever do that particular trick again. The past week I have noticed that he doesn't do it much anymore.
Other things he learned were shaking his head no and saying "dada". Not that he was actually saying no to mean "no" he could just move his head that particular way.
Still a super happy kid most of the time and really loves his new found freedom in crawling.
Hard parts this month were eating and sleeping.
He was still nursing like a champ, but we decided to try a little bit of people food. I didn't really have a game plan going into introducing solids to him and we were both thrown off our game during the process. The 3rd-ish week into it he got pretty constipated so we backed off until that had taken care of itself. Today a month later things still aren't perfect but I like where we are headed. We decided to not go the rice cereal route and just go straight to veggies. He doesn't love many veggies which is frustrating so we will see how things go in the end but right now feedings are slow. He has had a few fruits but we are mostly sticking to veggies. Currently he mostly just eats people food cut up into tiny pieces at meal times. He "feeds" himself so he is obviously not getting tons, but he is still nursing full time so he isn't lacking nutrients. Surprisingly he eats the best feeding himself. We do try and spoon feed him pureed food about once a day to help get him a little more substance to his diet but a lot of the times he won't eat what we offer. We luckily have not had to buy any baby food yet. He just eats what we eat or we blend up some veggies for a pureed texture so that has been SO nice on the budget. Would I introduce solids this way again instead of doing the traditional store bought pureed baby food? I don't know! Still trying to figure that out.
Sleep. I would never have thought that I would have a child that was still not sleeping through the night at 7 months old, but guess what I was wrong! haha We got WAY off his schedule in the middle of the month and he started refusing to go to sleep till like 1 or 2 am for a few nights. Today we are back on track with 3 naps a day and to bed by 9. It isn't a perfect schedule just a rough guide for us to follow. One thing I did learn this month is that it is actually better that he doesn't sleep through the night. I make more milk if he eats in the middle of the night so I am happy that he wakes up once or twice a night since he needs all the milk he can get these days. Adalyn always slept through the night and I think that was part of my problem with her when I couldn't produce enough milk.
In the end we learned some good things from this month and made a few mistakes. Jensen is a joy and we adore him even if we don't always know what he wants/needs (we are trying buddy!).
