Eight Months

Life is so full eight months after Andrew's birth.

For him, the last few months have been very busy.  Each milestone is an achievement of will and effort.  The books suggest that these just happen, but everything has a cause.  Andrew's cause is his will.

Around five months, he wanted to sit.  He tried so hard to do sit-ups.  He loved being sat up, and he tried to hold himself upright with his arms.  He would fall over, but he never tired of sitting games.

Around six months, he mastered sitting.  He moved on to trying to crawl.  It took him about a month and a half of trying to learn how.  He spent more and more time on his hands, knees, and feet.  Super-focused on balancing and expending tremendous effort to remain upright.  He learned to rock himself back and forth.  He learned to move each leg independently.  He learned to sit up from a crawling position.  This accomplishment was a distraction from his mission to crawl as it allowed him to play with free hands whenever he wanted.

The last thing he learned was how to hold his arms directly below his shoulders and move them one at a time.  We could leave him alone on the floor and he would occupy himself completely with the effort.

Now, around eight months, he wants to walk.  He's nowhere near walking or standing unassisted, but he is trying so hard.  At the moment, his favorite way to practice is to crawl to one of us and push himself up.  He often starts on our legs, bent all the way over with his palms down on a thigh and his feet flat on the ground.  Then he will stand straight up!  If nothing is behind him, down he goes, but normally we will catch his hands.  He will glance at you and cackle, a long thin line of drool hanging from his lower lip.

Does he love the novelty each accomplishment brings?  Or is he anticipating and reveling in the fact that he has accomplished?  Probably both.  He loves novelty, but from a very early age he has loved to accomplish things.  I remember when,in his first month, he triumphed at kicking out of a swaddle. I remember how, in his fourth month, he figured out how to pull down his car seat cover.

Other things I want to remember:

He loves to pull hair.  Libby has to keep her hair in a pony tail, but I've decided to let him pull mine all it wants.  Sometimes it hurts, and a few times he has managed to pull quite a bit out.  But it's not just the hair on my head.  If he is sitting on my lap or next to me, he will pull my leg hair.  Repetitively.  He will grab, pull, release.  Grab, pull, release.  It can be very painful.

Eating is kind of disgusting because of how messy it is.  If we give him a spoon, food gets flung really far.  We've seen it fly about six feet so far.  It gets in under his neck folds, and up his arm past his elbow, and in his eyebrows and hair.

The hard things:

It is still hard to do anything.  He won't sleep unless we hold him.  He hates going to sleep.  Many nights, he starts screaming and crying as soon as I take him back to the bedroom to have his diaper changed for bed.  We tried to build routines to help him ease into sleep, but he hates sleep so much that he started transferring his crying earlier and earlier up the chain of routines.  Eventually, we just stripped it down to the necessities to minimize the time he spends angry.

He loses self-control or something at bed-time.  He becomes frenetically hyper.  If you sit down, he'll try to crawl away.  If you hold him standing, he will crane his neck, and lean back, or lean to the side, or otherwise try to escape.  And, the whole time, he is fussing and whining.

He won't calm for me at night at all.  He will only calm for his mother.  Last night, after a hard day, she nursed him through his first fussiness, and then I put him in the ergo.  He hated it, and squirmed and fought and cried, but he was out in five minutes.  But then you can't put him down without waking him.  I tried after a half an hour, and he was immediately awake.

We can get so little done because he has to be held 14+ hours a day.  It's just exhausting.  We'd like to let him cry it out, but it bothers the neighbors.  I'm worried we've waited too long.  Now, he'll get up and crawl around screaming.  Before, at least he wasn't mobile.