Here’s Jacker’s 8 month update . . .

Height: 30 inch 97th %

Head: 17.5 inches – 75th %

Weight:  19.8 50th %

Nicknames: Dumplin, buster, jack jack, sweet pea, jackers

Sleep: After terrible sleeping for 2 months, he’s slowly getting better. We started putting him to bed once it was dark (which was later than his original bedtime), letting him nap less, and I put bergamont in his diffuser every night. He sleeps from 830pm to 730am and most of the time he wakes up twice. But with our improvements the first wake up isn’t until between 1-3. So he only wakes up once while I’m asleep. Let’s be honest that is the most helpful thing here.

We tried sleep training him, but since he’s exclusively breastfed I’m concerned those nighttime feedings are needed to be sure he’s getting enough food – which is common with breastfeeding babies I’ve read. There are several ways I could get more food to him during the day, (pumping, supplementing, more often) but I don’t want to do any of those for various reasons unless necessary. since he’s slowly getting better we’re going to just deal with it.

Feeding: Still a nursing champ! So proud of my boy and myself. 8 months strong!! We’re also still doing really well with solid foods. I started giving him 4 ounces of water a day and he started pooping more 🙂 It’s a struggle to get him to take the water tho. He sometimes won’t take it unless there’s some sort of juice or sugar in it, and I don’t like giving him sugar or sugary juice. So we also added prunes every 3 days. I hate prunes so I hate giving them to him, but I finally gave it up. He LOVES them so who am I to judge. Plus he poops every 3 days now. We’re introducing 3 meals a day this month. So we’ll see how this goes.

Fun Stuff: He fully sits up on his own for extended period of times, can support his weight (just doesn’t have the balance to stand yet), he’s been fully rolling everywhere for a while but I’ve been trying to get him to crawl so this has somehow taken off even more, he can lift himself up to crawl and will sometimes army crawl – but no crawl yet, he talks and screams and squeals all the time, he’s learned to love reading books (he used to get bored), and bath time is now even better that he can sit up. We had our 2nd to last eye doctor appointment, and no glaucoma (which my husband was born with) 🙂 One more appointment just to confirm and we’re all done.

The best thing about this month is he says ‘mama’ I’m not considering it his first word because he 100% doesn’t know what he’s saying or that it’s my name. However, it’s the one word/noise he says consistently and will clearly say back to you when you ask him to. He’s making some sort of noise  90% of the time he’s awake and he’s saying ‘mama’ or ‘mommommommom’ 60% of that. And I can die happy.