Seven Months

I was waiting in line at Sonic this afternoon when I realized that today is Jesse's seven-month birthday. Time must really be flying, because I keep telling people (and myself) that Jesse is six-and-a-half months old, and for some reason I've been thinking that he'll be seven months next week, so I was shocked to look at the date on my phone and realize that he is now officially seven months old. I am really bad about taking a monthly picture (especially on the right day), so I came home and took one before I forgot. Since he has a one-month and five-month picture on the same blanket, I'll just continue to go with this idea.

What Jesse is up to at 7 months:

• In the past couple weeks (and especially this past week) he has really taken to solid foods. He hasn't met a food he doesn't like. More on that in another post.
• Still nursing about 5 times a day (or every 3 to 3.5 hours)
• Still taking 3 naps a day, but sometimes just 2. He takes a short nap in the early morning, a longer one around lunchtime, and a longer one mid-afternoon. He is getting better and better about staying up longer periods of time. I am looking forward to him dropping that third nap so that his daytime sleep will be more consolidated, which will make it easier for us to go places without me having to worry about him falling asleep in the car and messing up his sleep schedule. I can usually get him out of his car seat and into his crib without waking him up, but sometimes I can't and then he won't go back to sleep, which makes for a fussy day.
• Overall he is still sleeping well at night. He usually goes down by 7, but sometimes earlier if he's been up a long time or didn't take good naps during the day, and he wakes up around 6 or so. Because he is so easy to rock to sleep, we had decided to hold off on letting him cry himself to sleep, but we decided otherwise earlier this week because of some night waking issues. He used to cry out at night and we could just stick his pacifier back in and he would immediately calm down and go back to sleep (he never seemed to completely wake up), but recently he will be wide awake when we go in there, and he's also started crying out multiple times before we even get in bed at night. Since he doesn't seem hungry and since we don't want to get in the habit of rocking him back to sleep multiple times a night, it seemed our best bet was to let him cry. (I think he actually just wanted our company, because he was very content as long as we stood there over his crib with our hand on him, but as soon as we walked out he would cry). The first time we let him do this was rough, and he cried about 45 minutes, but the next time we let him cry it was just 20 minutes, and then when he woke up really early at 5 a.m. the next morning, he cried for just several minutes before going back to sleep until 6:30. We thought we'd just let him cry in the middle of the night when he woke up, but I was having trouble getting him down for the night several nights ago, so I let him cry and he fell asleep pretty quickly. The new routine is to sing him several songs before bedtime or naptime and then lay him down in his crib (assuming he's not asleep or almost asleep). So far, so good, and it seems that he is staying asleep all night again but I don't want to speak too soon since we haven't been doing this very long, so we'll see if he keeps this up.
• His favorite toys seem to be things that aren't toys at all. He will entertain himself for a long time with my make-up bag (he especially loves the tube of mascara and the mirrors...we will have to put this to a stop before too long). He also loves to sit by his big box of toys and take everything out. He is entertained much longer like this, whereas he gets bored really quickly sitting on his blanket with just one or two toys.
• I think he's going to crawl soon, because he is really good at getting up on all fours and rocking back and forth. I know he really wants to be mobile.
• We can tell that he is becoming more and more attached to us, and especially me. He has started crying a little when I go out the door, and one morning this week James watched him before work while I ran to the store, and I could tell he was so happy to see me return because he had the biggest smile and kept giggling when I walked back in. He will also reach for me sometimes when he wants me to pick him up.