Heather: 8 months

Heather:

• LOVES taking baths.
• LOVES to look at new things and people.
• HATES when I leave the room. (Sometimes, she hates when I am out of reach. Many of our afternoons are spent with us trying to figure out how I can hold her tight while she crawls around and plays. Obviously, this is impossible, but it seems to be what she would really like.)

• LOVES the VeggieTales opening song. I use it to distract her while I trim her nails!
• LOVES shiny balloons.
• HATES those few seconds between when she realizes I’m going to nurse her and when the nipple actually enters her mouth.

• LOVES eating Cheerios.
• LOVES chewing on things. Sometimes, she’ll grab your finger and shove it in her mouth—right back along the side, not in front— to chew on.
• HATES loud, sudden noises. Also running bathwater or the blender or vacuum. And sirens up close scare the living daylights out of her.

• LOVES playing with hair—mine, Kyle’s, whatever.
• LOVES pulling over the recycling bag and playing with whatever she can find inside.
• LOVES little flashing lights, like on computers.
• HATES story time. (I really, really hope this is temporary. She has always loved it! But she currently seems to greatly prefer our books to library books, which make her squirm and thrash and cry. Strange.)

• LOVES pulling books off bookshelves (or out of boxes).
• LOVES getting vitamins—or anything from a dropper, really. She gets iron twice a day, and a tri-vitamin and fluoride once a day. She loves them all. (In good news, I’ve been able to stop giving her gas drops, though she loved those, too.)
• HATES going to sleep.
• LOVES being held (unless you’re trying to get her to sleep, of course). She’ll crawl a long ways to get you to pick her up. (And then she’ll hoist her armpits at you until you do!)

• LOVES being tossed in the air/held upside-down.
• HATES having her face washed.
• LOVES making noise.
• LOVES squeaking her fingers down the pages of her board books.
• LOVES when Daddy comes home.

It’s getting rather difficult to get candid shots of her; as soon as she sees the camera, she bolts for it:

And a sleep update: Heather’s getting pretty good at staying asleep/soothing herself back to sleep if she wakes up, but she’s also started fighting the initial put-down pretty hard. We’re down to one nap a day, which is insane, but seems to be working alright for us. She’s getting enough total sleep (she usually sleeps 12-13 hours at night, so a one- or two-hour nap is okay, according to her pediatrician), but the stretch between the nap and bedtime gets kind of long some days, and she grumps.

Heather is growing and learning so quickly these days! We have a lot of fun with her, and we love her very much.