10 Months with C - Ellen Slater

Someone very cool has been charming the heck out of us for 10 months now.

C at 10 Months

C gets more fun every day. She is so silly, so happy, and so chill – most of the time. She loves to go off and play with toys (and not-toys) in every corner of the house, and she equally loves to cling to my legs while I’m doing chores or lay across my arms while I’m reading her a story. When we’re out and about, she is so interested in everything around us. We’ve been lucky to have the prettiest, most mild fall, and C loves to be outside. We’ve taken advantage of the weather with a lot of pre-nap walks, playtime in the grass while I work in the flower beds, and just sitting on the deck and playing with leaves.

In the last week, C has decided she usually only wants to hold onto one of your hands when she is walking, and it’s clear she doesn’t really the help at all unless she’s tired. She loves to practice standing from a squat, and she managed two independent steps a few days ago. Her cruising has gotten way faster, to the point that if I don’t see it, I’m still a little surprised she moved that fast on her own. I’m so excited to see her start walking more.

She still gets so excited when we get out of the car and she realizes we’re at Little Gym each week.

C loves dogs and pictures of animals, and we’ve been to the zoo a few times. The last time, she actually showed a lot of interest in the bears and lions, and she fed a giraffe. When she sees something she likes, she leans into it and kisses it, and she did that to the glass at the lion enclosure.

This is all from the last few months, but it’s still true: She loves peekaboo and crawling toward things she knows she shouldn’t so someone will wrestle her away. Pretending to gobble up her arm/leg/belly results in some of the best little giggles and she loves being upside-down. She lights up when you clap and tell her she did a good job (and this often saves her from tears when she takes a minor tumble).

She also claps when she thinks she did a good job and to the beat of music. Her new thing is waving at people, and she got to show it off big time on Halloween. She was a social butterfly handing out candy, and she tried to escape to trick-or-treat with the big kids about twenty times.

C still has six teeth, but the next two lower teeth are coming any second now. She’s been waking up with little cuts on her upper lips from chewing them so much.

Sleep

Bedtime is usually not a big deal. Putting C down for the first time usually takes 20-45 minutes, including story time. If she needs anything after that in the evening, it’s typically only once and takes around 5-15 minutes.

Usually, she lets me nurse her most of the way to sleep and then I give her a bottle to finish the job. Lately, she’s been taking less and less from the bottle. She generally wakes a little in the transfer to her crib and I rub her back and sing to her to resettle her.

When she gets up once during the night and once during the 5:30-6:30am hour, I consider it pretty normal.

However, there have been a few times in the last few weeks where she’ll get up for 2+ hours in the middle of the night. Usually, she’s just happy and wants to play. She has a friend about her age who has been doing the same thing, so I figure it’s developmental. But the other night, she just cried until she was almost asleep in my arms and then she’d wake up and do it all over again. That time, it was clearly teething pain. Poor buddy.

Anyway, we’ll see what she does with the time change.

Naps are less tricky than it used to be, but still not that consistent. Lately, her first nap is usually an hour-plus. Sometimes, she takes a 30-minute nap in the late afternoon, too. But she hasn’t been doing that too often.

C has been insisting on an 8 or 8:30 bedtime lately. Jack usually gives her a bath and starts getting her ready for bed around 7 or 7:15 and then they play and read while I clean up around the house.

My sleep has been blah with C’s sleep being a bit of a mess, but I try to go up to bed around 9pm-10pm, read for a few minutes, and then pass out. Depending on when I went to bed and how tired I am, I get up between 5 and 6. C has mostly been getting up for the day at or after 8 for a few weeks now. If she gets up earlier than 7, I try to nurse her back to sleep.

Feeding

C eats very well, and is still extremely distractible when nursing. She often decides she can’t eat because the world is too interesting. She usually nurses the longest and snuggles the most after breakfast and at bedtime. The rest of her nursing sessions generally last under 10 minutes.

We eat dinner as a family, and C and I eat breakfasts and lunches together. I notice that she wants to nurse less frequently and I’m pumping less volume when I pump, so she must be getting some decent calories from food. Even when it seems like a lot of it ends up on the floor.

C is so fun at mealtimes, and it’s cool to notice her getting less messy (sometimes). She’s also made a ton of progress with drinking. We gave her an open cup to drink from maybe 6 weeks ago for the first time. It was hilarious and she ended up drenched. Now, she has the hang of it. She still tips it over to chew on the bottom when she’s done drinking and therefore still ends up drenched, but she can actually drink from it on her own now. Sometimes I think her favorite part of eating is drinking water.

Schedule

Things are so different with C waking up after 8 most mornings. She doesn’t usually go down for her first nap till 11:30-12. If that nap lasts till 1, she very well might not take an afternoon nap, since a nap at 5 would mean bedtime at 9 or later (I made that mistake once this month). Right now, C nurses every 4-5ish hours during the day and eats 3 solid meals.

I feel like the internet had me all sure that when she dropped to one nap, it would be this lovely 2.5-hour thing I could count on every day, and it would start well after she turned 1. I did not take into account that C has always seemed to need less sleep than the average baby her age. But it will all change again. If she starts getting up before 8, we’ll almost certainly be back to two naps. Maybe once she starts walking more, she’ll need more sleep because she can tire herself out in a whole new way. We shall see.

Things I Don’t Want to Forget

How peaceful she looks when she falls asleep on me. It’s harder every day to put her down because I adore the cuddles. But she usually sleeps better on her own unless I’m helping with part 2 of a nap. I love that she’s in a phase of occasionally wanting help with naps.
The way she reaches out to touch everything from the wall to the banister to the buttons on the oven when we carry her through the house. She gets so excited when you let her get close enough to touch.
Before naptime and bedtime, C will grab a burp cloth, her sleep sack, or one of her loveys, put the tag to her mouth, and babble at it loudly. We call this “yelling at tags,” and it’s such a funny part of her pre-sleep routine.
Speaking of,C loves the tags on her toys and rubbing her fingers on anything that vaguely resembles tags or nubs. She plays with the hem of my shorts, the extra length on my watch, my hair, the diamond on my engagement ring, and the clip on my bra while she’s trying to fall asleep.
When she sees herself in a mirror or picture, she leans forward to “hug” and “kiss” herself. Basically, this looks like bumping her head into the mirror or picture and licking it.
Her squeals. Sometimes they’re happy and sometimes they’re just how she uses her voice, but they are the best.
How she calms down and gets so excited the second I pull out a book to read. And when she’s really tired, she melts down the second a book is over.
She loves it when you sing Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes, The Grand Old Duke of York, and I’ll Make a Man Out of You.
When I’m laying on the floor in her room, she’ll come crawling super fast from across the room and give me an open-mouthed kiss. Sometimes it’s on my ribs, sometimes on my forehead, always super sweet. And then she collapses onto me.
She thinks it’s absolutely hilarious when we yawn or fake sneeze, or blow our noses.
When she wants picked up for any reason, she stretches as tall as she can and reaches for you. It’s so sweet and pure.
Usually, she’ll then lay her head on your shoulder for at least a second and it melts my heart.
She loves to watch and touch Ben and Willis. Now that she can chase him, Ben is wary of her and prefers to be the one to approach her. Willis usually doesn’t pull away when she touches him anymore.

Things We Use and Love

Pretty much everything from her 2-month post. She doesn’t love the pacifiers except to bite. She has outgrown the Podster, but it served us well when she was teeny.
Pretty much everything from her 3-month post.
Pretty much everything from her 4-month post. We’re done with the weighted sleep sacks, but I’d use them for a future kiddo.
Pretty much everything from her 5-month post.
Pretty much everything from her 6-month post.
The only thing I listed in her 7-month post.
The only thing I listed in her 9-month post.
Bumkins Long-Sleeved Baby Bibs – An unexpected skill I have learned as a mom is how to get any stain out of anything. But these make after-meal clean-up a lot less work. Usually the only parts of C’s clothes that get anything on them with these are the neck (she has a super tiny neck apparently, and even when tied as tight as possible, it’s not quite tight enough to cover her shirt) and sometimes the hems around her legs if she drops something that doesn’t get caught by the pockets.