Sleep

So pretty much bang on eight months Leila has started being able to sleep through the night.  She doesn't do it every night, but has done it a number of times in the last week or so.
If she sleeps through the night she does tend to wake a little earlier (just after 5am rather than just before 6am).  Just because she sleeps through though doesn't mean that I do (!) as I tend to still wake at least once in the night - and find myself checking my watch for the time and that the monitor is still on!
Sleeping longer at night has pulled her naps in the day back slightly though - she is back to shorter naps, but takes three a day (rather than two naps including one long one).
All these changes are taking place as Leila is really getting busy in the day - she can now pull herself up to standing on the furniture in the house and can cruise around the living room.  She can also crawl across the living room (with the right motivation - Scott's guitar playing gets the best out of her) and of course she still loves her 'walking'.
Will all this change when we get to the UK next week?!

The Things We See In Egypt crawling challenge

The best way to get Leila to crawl is to pop her on one side of the room while we move to the other and encourage her to come to us...in this case with a song and the video camera!

Forget the spoon - just gimme the bowl!

Leila has been enjoying fishcakes that i made, but last time i had some leftover mash so i added some carrots and made a carroty mash for her. I decided to give this to her on a loaded spoon that she could feed herself with and she did brilliantly getting it into her mouth and getting everything off it. She was making so many yummy noises i couldn't reload the spoon quick enough so i decided to just give her the bowl and see what she'd make of it.
She loved it!

Waking up in the night...

...well one of us is...and it turns out that's me!

Last night Leila slept from 7pm until 6am without waking!  Her first ever night of sleeping through.

Normally she wakes for a feed around 3am and then wakes between 5am and 6am to get up, but last night she didn't wake for a feed at all and Scott's 6am alarm went off before she cried out for me to come through. 

Now, just because she slept through doesn't mean that I did!  Of course I woke up at 1.30am and then again at 5am both times checking the time and checking that the monitor was still working!

It was great that she slept so well - and hopefully I will sleep well too at some point.  I'm not counting on this being more than a fluke at this stage though and fully expect to be woken up in the early hours once more.

Leila's eigth month

This has been a month of movement!

Play and Development
This month Leila has decided that all she wants to do it walk!  She sits with her arms up and whinges until one of us comes over and gives her our hands to hold.  She can then pull herself up to standing and totters around with us trailing behind with out backs bent! She can get quite fast but we are trying to encourage her to move while holding on to the furniture to save our backs.

Leila's next new trick this month was learning to sit up from lying down.  She did this a number of times for Scott before she showed me!  Less than a week after doing this she was able to pull herself up to standing in her cot and on the Pooh Vtech activity bar.  These are all quite exciting developments, but they are also quite draining as we try and keep up with her and baby-proofing the flat.  This has involved tracking down a playpen, made of four separate 'fence' panels, which we've managed to attach between two heavy pieces of furniture.  This way she has a sizeable play area, but one we're reasonably confident can be kept baby-proofed!  We've also done some tidying of cables, and managed to get some socket covers for the mains power sockets.  We have enough problems with power without Leila playing about with the sockets!

She is able to get herself into a crawling position but so far hasn't got anywhere with it.  From her crawling position on her knees she often pushes herself up onto her feet (yoga-style) and then flops back down to sitting.  Using this method she is able to move around a fair bit, kind of like the way a netball player is able to move one step in any direction.

Leila still enjoys turning the pages of her cardboard books to see that the back of the page is different to the front.  After two months with her monkey book she has finally noticed that there is material in it giving a different texture to each page.

We have introduced plastic cups at bathtime now which she enjoys being poured onto her belly.  This, and daddy getting her ready for her bath, can really make her smile and laugh "A, het, het, het, het"

Feeding / Eating
Leila is having three meals a day now and we have introduced lots of fruit and veg as well as protein (chicken, salmon and beef) and carbohydrate (potato and pasta).  She is getting a lot better with her grip and manipulating food but still manages to splatter everything in sight at times.  She really favours her right hand when eating and often her left hand will be at her side and not even touch the table!  We have introduced a cup and are trying to teach her to drink water from the lip.  She's able to do this, but is not holding it herself yet and doesn't always take very much water in. We sometimes give her a spoon for soup (or BM ice lollies!) which she can use for both eating and splattering.

I don't feel that she is taking significantly less milk from me yet.  She still feeds four times a day (before nap times) and once in the middle of the night.  There are some meals when she eats a lot of food, but there tends to be one meal a day when she hardly touches what we put in front of her. I think I will be bf her until at least a year - we could switch her on to formula, but it feels like we have come so far with bf that I may as well finish her off!

Sleeping
Finally Leila has started to have a 'long' nap - although this is not everyday and sometimes she still decides to wake after 35 minutes (usually when you really need a rest or to get some jobs done around the house!).  If she has a long nap then this is often in the morning around 8am and will last 1 1/2 hours (or even 2 hours!) She is still on three naps a day, but sometimes the afternoon one can be hard to get and we abandon it if she cries for 20 minutes and won't settle.  This can mean that she will go five hours without a nap before bed and so does get grumpy towards the end.

Her sleeping at night is still good and she goes down well after our slightly later routine ending at 7pm.  She still wakes once in the night to feed.  She can self-settle once she is asleep which we know because we sometimes hear her cry out around 8 or 9pm for a minute and then silence again.

We put her to sleep on her front still, but she often sleeps curled up on her side and sometimes on her back too.  We have finally removed the Angelcare movement monitor as we were finding that it was going off because she had moved away from it in the cot.

Right at the end of the month we started to have some sleep problems again because she has learnt a new trick of standing up in her cot.  So instead of going to sleep herself if we put her down sleepy, she will instead get up to standing and start to cry out.  We know that if we feed her to sleep then she will stay down, but also know that that is not a long-term option, so will have to re-start some sleep training again soon :-(

Health
I have been off dairy and eggs for two months now and Leila seems to be doing well.  I have been doing a lot better myself on this diet since the P's came over and brought me lots of dairy-free treats! We have arranged to see a specialist when we are in the UK over the summer which will hopefully shed some light on everything that has been going on.

This month Leila had her first cold :-(  She was snuffly for a few days and then one morning woke up at 3am for her feed and just wouldn't go back to sleep.  She just kept crying every time I tried to put her down in her cot.  I got Scott up in the end and we did the nasal aspirator and gave her some Calpol.  Scott then got her to sleep in the sling as she seemed a lot happier being upright than lying down.  She had one really bad day of it and then a few days of still being quite snotty and unhappy.  A week later she is still a bit snotty, but the worst of it is over.

A week of firsts

This has been a week of firsts.

First cold.  Which resulted in first sleepless night (couldn't get back to sleep after night feed, so Scotty took her out in the sling to sleep upright and help breathing through runny nose), first calpol and first missed baby group (we have gone to every one since November apart from one in February when we were in U.K.)

First 'dad day.' I had to work so Scott had the day off to look after Leila. A shame that she was so poorly that neither of them could enjoy it much! Scotty reported that she would start crying if he moved away from her.

First clonk from her toddling around. Her favourite thing at the moment is walking whilst we break our backs bending doen to hold her hands and walk behind her.  Her first clonk was with me on the bookcase.   Her second clonk, and first bruise, was with Scott on the coffee table.

First proper poo.  She is going to be mad at us when she is oldet because of how much we spoke about her poo!

First sit up from  lieing down.  She did this a dozen times for Scott befor I witnessed it! She gets herself onto her front, then onto her side, then gradually folds herself in two and pushes up with her hands.
First sit up from lieing down in her cot.  I discovered that she'd rather learn how to do this than have a nap this afternoon when I went in and found her sitting at the foot of the cot with her arm on the rail.  Needless to say we had lowered the cot to its lowest position within 30 minutes if this discovery!

Exciting times!  What will next week bring?!

Looks Who's Walking!

Okay...so she's not properly walking, but Leila absolutely loves pulling herself up onto her feet if you hold her hand, and then she wals around the room as we hold her.  She's exploring all around the living room area, and we're trying to set a 'boundary' at the kitchen door - she tries to get that far, but then we stop and encourage her to turn round.

Curiously, though, she hasn't been very keen on using her walker/activity-centre to walk.  Or at least she hadn't been keen until today...

Adventures with my Spoon

We thought we'd have a go at introducing Leila to a spoon even though she is a dab hand with her, well, hands.

We'd read that you could get special molds for making your own lollies for babies (a great idea in this heat!), but we decided to improvise with her spoon, an ice-cube tray and some expressed breastmilk.  Leila was able to grab hold of the spoon handle well and seemed to be enjoying the cold against her gums whilst defrosted milk dribbled down her chin. This turned to tears though when she managed to break the ice lolly off and was left with a chunk of ice-milk in her mouth - it was all a little too much and too cold for her and she screwed her face up proper crying until I was able to get the ice out and give her a little cuddle!

Today I thought I'd give soup a go.  It was mainly for my lunch, rather than hers, but she was able to grab hold of her spoon and get a bit of the soup in her mouth (and some down her front, on her face etc etc).  After a while we did abandon the spoon and used her steamed carrot sticks instead.  It was quite funny to see her face as she shoved a carrot stick into her mouth and was greeted with the taste of sweet potato and broccoli soup!

Things to remember

I'm writing this short post for no other reason than to act as a memory-jogger when we look back on this in years to come.

There is a point in the day - a short 2 minute snatch of time - that is probably my favourite moment with Leila at the moment.  I know that this sounds daft, and some may say I'm stupid for not enjoying all the other times, but this one bit is a real highlight.  It's the couple of minutes I cuddle her after bathing/drying/putting her in her sleeping bag before she goes to Alice for a final bit of milk before bed.

In those couple of minutes she transitions from 'playing' mode to 'bedtime' mode.  I stand just to the side of the mobile that Fabia bought her, and lightly tap it to make it sway a little.  Leila is absolutely fascinated by it.  During the day she pays it very little attention, but with the lights changed for bedtime she stares in absolute innocent wonder at it.

She's done this for about a month, but tonight I was very aware of something that had been plaguing me a bit - she's not as awestruck by the mobile as she used to be.  The wide-eyed amazement has given way to familiarity with a favourite toy, and although she still clearly enjoys staring at it there's an awareness in her eyes that she didn't used to have.  She's growing up, becoming more a part of her environment than merely an observer, and so the things around her have maybe lost a bit of that special magic they once had.

Having said that, she spent ten minutes hypnotised by playing with my tie this morning, so there's still plenty of things for her to be fascinated by!

Eating out

We have been doing a bit of eating out recently with some success and with a lot of learning for the future!

First was a trip to Costa Coffee near the Grand Mall.
Best bit:  BLW in action when Leila had some of the chicken from my wrap as the banana I had brought for her wasn't ripe enough.
Lessons learnt:  #1 Get a big enough table so that nothing you don't want her to grab is within her reach!  We were too modest when choosing a table and Leila took a liking to Scott's lunch which wasn't BLW approved! #2 Always have something to put on the floor or use a 'crumb catcher' bib to avoid constantly bending down to pick food up!





I took the P's and Leila to Cairo Kitchen when they were over last week.
Best bit:  BLW in action again as Leila demolished chicken and roast veggies.  Also the great food that they have is so yummy - and they deliver!  Why roast a chicken again?!
Lessons learnt:  #1 Just because a place has high chairs doesn't mean that they will come up to the table!  Leila was at 'head bonking' height against the table with the high chair they had, so she had to sit away from the table and be handed her food to eat. #2  Always keep an eye out for a reaction.  Leila has been fine with peppers but seemed to come up in a red rash this time round.  Thankfully a wipe of the (much loved) wet flannel helped and it went down within an hour.

 

This weekend we had lunch at an old favourite, Lucielle's.  Note that Leila is in a clamp-on high chair that we brought with us to avoid the problem we had at Cairo Kitchen (thanks to the P's for bringing that out and to the Dudley's for passing it on!).  She is also eating red peppers without a reaction, so who knows what the problem was last week.

Best bit: Leila has now had some of the world's best burger!

Lessons learnt:  Bring something to help entertain while waiting for food! 

 

Some of our meals out have been a bit stressful, but we're still glad we have done them and want to do more as it is fun to be all out together and eating :-)