Baby Autumn is now 8 months old. She’s growing bigger and bigger each day and is definitely learning new skills and developing her own personality traits. She’s got a lovely smile and a really cute laugh. She adores being around her big brother and she encourages him to be as crazy as he can by laughing at everything he does.
Autumn – Month 8
Sleeping
We’ve had quite a big change here. Autumn has been moved into her own bedroom now. I started the process by putting her down for her daytime naps in her own room, which she seemed absolutely fine with. Then after a few days, we started to put her down to bed at night time in her own room. She has pretty good nights overall. She tends to wake up a couple of times a night and realise she has lost her dummy, so she shouts until someone comes and pops it back in. She’s been really good about going straight back to sleep though. I do miss just being able to reach over the bedside crib to pop her dummy in. I’m hoping she’ll soon get the hang of putting her own dummy back in during the night and my sleep won’t be as disrupted.
She’s still having 3 naps a day. One in the morning around 8:45ish, one around 11:30 am and then another one around 3:30 pm. I did try and move her lunchtime nap a bit later as I thought she might be better with a longer break between the two morning naps, but she was so tired after just 2 hours of being awake, I had to move the nap so it was earlier. She seems to generally sleep a bit better if she goes down earlier too. I wonder whether she was struggling to stay asleep between sleep cycles when she was overtired.
She’s generally asleep by 6:30 – 7 pm in the evening and will sleep through until about 6:30 – 7 am the following day. We have dropped the night feed and she’s been absolutely fine about it.
Feeding
We decided to drop the night feed at the beginning of the new year. We were waking her at around 10 – 11 pm to give her a bottle, but we both felt she would be fine if we dropped that feed. She would sometimes take a long time to settle again after being woken up so this seems to work better for her.
She now has four 10oz bottles each day. Most days she nearly finishes all the milk.
We’ve persevered with weaning. She’s still not very keen on eating, but we have had some success with her putting food into her mouth and she’s even eaten a tiny amount. Her favourite things so far seem to be yoghurt, avocado, anything bread-based, cream cheese, strawberries, pasta and cheese omelette. She pretty much refuses to be spoon-fed, so I often just give her a little bit of food to play with whilst we are eating. She will accept a small amount of yoghurt off a spoon but that’s about it. She also tried a little bit of my homemade fish pie which she seemed to like the taste of, so I’ll be making her more of that.
Nappies
We’re using size 3 nappies during the day and size 4 overnight. I was worried about her having a nappy leak if we didn’t change her at around the 10 pm mark, but so far it’s been fine. I suspect it is helping that she also now doesn’t have another bottle at 10 pm.
Mental and Physical Development
She’s showing a preference for certain toys. She loves being in her jumperoo, but only if she’s well-fed and well-rested. She’s interested in toys that make a noise like small musical instruments. We’ve got a couple of different types of baby pianos and she will play with them quite intensely for quite a while. We’ve got one which is a more traditional keyboard style piano and then one which sounds more like a xylophone which she adores. She also enjoys playing our real piano with my husband. She’s got a couple of rattles, shakers and a sound drum which she always plays with really well. Austin has got a small toddler drum kit, so I’ve set her up on her baby seat with it a couple of times and she’s enjoyed playing it like bongos. She can’t quite use the drumsticks, but she gives it a good go.
Like her brother, she also enjoys toys with wheels. All of us quite often play with the huge collection of Duplo that we have. She really enjoys the duplo that has wheels or propellors.
We’ve also had quite a few words now. She started with Mumma, then this was quite quickly followed by Dada, Hello, Bye Bye and Nana.
I think we are close now to cutting teeth, there are some definite bumps on her bottom gums and she has been dribbling like crazy.
Clothes-wise, we’ve had to change over her sleepsuits and trousers to the 9 – 12 month size as she appears to have quite long legs. Tops and dresses are fine and she’s still wearing predominantly 6 – 9 month clothes.
Thanks for popping by to read this. I’ll be back next month with the next update when Autumn is 9 months old.
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