My Favorite Eight-Month-Old

Will is eight months old and I'm having a hard time believing it. I remember the week after I had him my mom told me, "Just get through the first 3 months and then everything gets better." At the time since I hadn't slept in days (yes, just days... oh, how naive I was then) I thought, "Three MONTHS??" But she was right and sure enough the first 3 months FLEW by. I thought they seemed so fast because of sleep deprivation, but no, I've learned that with parenthood you just lose all sense of time. The busier Will gets, the busier I get, and the faster time goes. 

Since Will is crawling and can get pretty much anywhere he wants now, I am extra busy. I spend most of my day making sure he can't reach any remote controls, phones, or electric cords, isn't sucking on a pair of shoes I accidentally left by the front door, isn't trying to squeeze past our kitchen chair blockade to get to our food shelves, isn't pulling the pile of folded laundry down off the couch, and (more often than you'd think) pulling him away from our wood furniture to stop him from chewing on it. He also likes to come up to me if I'm sitting on the couch with my feet up on the coffee table and A) walk along the couch and push his head against my legs until I lift them up for him to pass or B) walk along the table so he can try to suck on my toes. 

Last week, my mom came and brought some of her toys over for Will to borrow (some of which I think were around when Brooke and I were little) and Will loves having a fresh batch of toys. His favorites are a chain of colorful links, a beaded teether toy, and this odd gold mirror/locket with a bunch of zodiac symbols (I think I picked it from a treasure box in one of my elementary school classes...?). Generally, he puts his toy of choice in his mouth (or at least one end of it), crawls to a different location, plays with it, chews on it, looks at it, puts it back in his mouth and goes somewhere else until he finds a better toy.

His favorite noise to make is a growl. He growls pretty much all day long. In fact, someone came up to me after church today (as I was pulling Will away from the wooden pew at the back *not a chew toy, Will*) and asked, "Is that the tiger I kept hearing?"

He also has MANY facial expressions, but his two favorites (and ours too, we still get a kick out of them) both involve scrunching up his nose, breathing loudly through his nose and either puckering his lips or giving a goofy smile (grimace?). SO funny.

He's got four teeth: his bottom front teeth and his top not front teeth but the ones next to them. I almost hope that his front teeth don't come for a few months. ("All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth" anyone?)

And did I mention he bear crawls on his hands and feet everywhere?

Sometimes I wonder how Taylor and I ended up with such a funny kid with so much personality.

 

 

 

  

 

Play Date

Last Tuesday I helped out some friends of ours and watched their little boy Harrison for a couple hours. So he and Will had a little play date. (Well, sort of. They're both old enough to play but they don't really play with each other. They just play next to each other. But I think that counts for now.) 

Here's how the play date went...

They got off to a rough start--it turns out Will is a bit of a bully. It's not really his fault though. Harrison, who is a few months older than Will, is starting to learn what "Be gentle" means. He kept looking at me every time Will was by him as if to ask, "Is this okay?" and he mostly just played with his toys and looked at Will. On the other hand, Will is an eager, curious, somewhat aggressive 8-month-old with absolutely no concept of personal boundaries at all (again, not his fault, just a different developmental stage).

First they just looked at each other. Then they got up the guts to sit closer together. Then Will made the first move. He reached for the shirt...

Then the face...

And then he pushed Harrison over.

Then, after reassuring Harrison, distracting both boys with different toys, and putting a little safer distance between them, Will crawled over (much to Harrison's dismay)...

And took Harrison's toy.

"He did it! He's the thief!"

But eventually Will gave him his space (he figured out that mom's camera was much more interesting than beating up other babies) and they just played. So I just took pictures of them.

It was fun for me to take pictures of another baby. My goal was to get some cute pictures of the two boys together, but instead I just ended up documenting my boy's little reign of terror, taking a bunch of blurry pictures of Will where he tried to crawl on me or grab the camera, and getting a few really cute ones of Harrison. He was such a good sport with Will, but I could not get him to smile for the camera. Still, he's a cutie right? 

Hopefully Will will learn to be nicer to him in the future.

Sleeping Like a Baby

This has been Will's go-to sleeping position for the past couple months: stomach down, head to the side, middle and ring fingers in mouth, feet tucked under, bum up. Like this...

We refer to it as the "stink bug" position. When he's in his crib he's also usually got his head jammed in to a corner to make it extra cozy. It's really precious and basically since he's figured out how to roll over, he's been sleeping like this. But over the last few months, Will's surprised us lots of other funny sleeping positions.

First, there's the "My thumb's caught on my lip" position. (This was pre-stomach-sleeping days.)

Then there's the "I can climb mountains in my sleep" position. This was taken on the "Y" in Provo, but he's fallen asleep in his carrier like this on a bunch of other hikes we've taken him on.

There's also the "I need to take up as much room as possible" position in his swing.

Or the "I fell asleep while playing but don't worry I'm still hanging on" position (also in the swing).

(Really, this is how I found him).

(And then he woke up when I took a picture and looked really concerned.)

And this one is my favorite. A couple weeks ago Will fell asleep on his hand and since he just slept in his diaper it left a perfectly clear hand print on his chest. Will's first five-star! (Sort of...)

Crawling

This may not be super interesting for some of you, but I guess I'm just a proud parent who thinks everything their baby does is amazing/adorable/etc. Also, Taylor's mom hasn't seen Will crawl yet so we told her we'd send her a video. I'd say he's a pro now.

Funny faces...

Will is the funniest little boy right now. He crawls, pulls himself up on furniture, gets into everything and puts everything in his mouth. He usually crawls somewhere, finds something he likes, sits down, looks around for a while, then moves somewhere else that catches his attention. I've had to put everything up off the floor, we've got our kitchen chairs spread strategically throughout the apartment, and I'm starting to reevaluate where we have all of our kitchen stuff. His favorite things to get into: our shoes (which we've had to move), DVDs (which we've had to block with a chair), and a grocery bag that we use for all of our plastic bottles to recycle (which I just let him play with... it's mostly just a bunch of empty gatorade bottles anyway). He loves to blow raspberries (at meal times, at church, first thing in the morning, you name it). He also continues to make us laugh with his many facial expressions.

Date Night...

Taylor found out at the beginning of summer that the 25th anniversary tour of...

...was coming to Thousand Oaks! So last Tuesday we got to see it and it was amazing. Taylor and I both grew up listening to it and know all the words by heart. And on a side note, on our third day of knowing each other Taylor won my heart over when he sang Javert's "Stars" for me. (Sappy? Yes. True? Also yes.) This was my fourth time seeing it and I never get tired of it. I even listened to the entire thing (again) in the car over the next couple days and am still singing the songs to myself all day. 

We sat in the top balcony so we had to hike up a few flights of stairs, but at intermission we stepped outside and basically had the whole outside balcony to ourselves with this pretty view.

Happy Date Night!