Audrey is 7 Months Old!

Audrey is 7 months old today!!  And a little under the weather, but hopefully on the mend.

So here are seven things about Audrey this month:

1.  We made the big switch from exclusively breast feeding to bottles/formula.  What a sanity saver for me, and a great surprise that she took to the bottles without any issues.  I was worried she would have problems because a) she is a little bit tongue tied and b) sometimes when never being offered one before, could cause refusal.  But voila!  We ended up replacing 3 feedings with bottles over the course of the month.  She was only taking about 5-6oz. from each bottle, but over the last couple of weeks, she started to take less and less.  So we actually cut out a bottle, and she's down to 2 (and taking about 6-7 oz. from each one) and nursing twice a day, too.  She's so good at it, she holds her own bottle already.  I don't think Grace held her bottle by herself till a little later.

2.  Eating 3 meals a day!  Sort of.  For breakfast she is having what I like to call the 'Belgian Baby Breakfast Cocktail'.  It consists of 2 ice cubes of either frozen pear or apple puree, 1/3 of a banana, and 1 cookie crumbled in the food processor all mixed together.  This is what her pedi says all the Belgian babies eat for breakfast, so I figured when in Rome....    She eats most of it.  The Belgian babies fully replace one milk feeding with this concoction, and it's 200g.  Since we're not replacing milk with food, I make it a little bit smaller, but it's still about 100g.  Lately, I'm also offering her chunks of banana or pear for her to practice picking up.  They are too slippery for much success, though.  For lunch, we were doing plain organic yogurt, but this week, I've started giving her some kiwi.  We're all fighting colds, so the extra vitamin C punch does us all good.  She's only doing a few bites at lunch time.  For dinner, we're still doing vegetables.  Since we've cut out one bottle, she's eating more at dinner time now.  About 2-3 ice cubes of veggies.  I'm really enjoying making her baby food.

3.  So with all that food, you'd think she would be packing on the pounds.  Mmmmmm....not as much as I would have thought.  I weighed her at home, and she is around 15.3lbs.  which is about a pound and a half since last month.  I don't know if that's a good, bad, or normal weight gain, but if I look at her growth curve, it puts her squarely back on the 25th percentile curve.  At 4 months she was on the 50th, and 5 months she fell to the 25th, and at 6 months she was between the 10th and 25th.  So I'm happy that she is at least back on the 25th.  And hopefully she'll stay there or gain even more!

4.  Still not making the sounds she should be making.....ba, ma, da, etc.  Matt says he heard her saying them the other morning, but I've yet to hear any.  But I do hear some ah ah ah sounds, so maybe soon.  But I'm doubting that she has a hearing problem.  She definitely hears us.  Sometimes she purposefully ignores us, too.

5.  Not on the move.....yet.  But pulling up on everything she can get her hands on.  Crazy.  I didn't expect that to happen.  I really thought I'd be writing that she was crawling, but maybe this is a precursor to crawling?  She just needs to put her hands down when she gets up on her knees, and off she'll go...... but I don't think she's caught on to that yet.  We are having quite a few face plants.  These floors are horrible for babies!!

6.  Taking 2 naps a day, sometimes a short third nap, and sleeping pretty good at night.  I'm putting her to bed earlier now.  She's in bed by at least 7:30pm and sleeps till about 7am.   Her morning nap is usually about an hour, and her afternoon nap is usually an hour and a half to two hours.  As I type this however, she is up there fussing off and on.  She's not feeling that great, so maybe that's why....but I'm not going to get her unless she gets too loud and wakes up the other  napper.

7.  Starting to get into patty cake and silly songs.  Her favorite seems to be the Itsy Bitsy Spider.  But is real attentive for clapping songs.  I'm trying to remember to do some of these things with her.  It's hard though with big sister needing attention, too.  But we make a game of it, and Grace helps.

And that's it....she's still our extreme baby!  She has gigantic, contagious smiles and laughs, and horrible, deep in the throat screams.  And flips on a dime.  But we all love her so much!