8 Months!

Miss Calista Diane is 8 months old!

It's hard to believe it's only been a month since our last update, because Cali has grown so much!  In the last month, Cali has been...

On the move!  Right before she turned 7 months she started properly crawling, and now at 8 months she's crawling like a champ and can move from crawling to sitting and back again.  On top of that, she's also pulling up to stand on everything and cruising around the furniture!  She can also get back down on her own most of the time, and often lets go with one hand (or both!) while she's standing.  I turn my back for a second and she's across the room, or standing up somewhere.  It's insane!

Standing like a big girl - the activity table is a big favorite.

Where'd Cali go?

My helper in the kitchen

Oh hi, mom!

She routinely moves from the toy chest to the activity table and back.

Nothing on the table is safe anymore!

Peek a boo!

         She's also now trying to master the stairs!  She's fearless.  We're in so much trouble.

Talking again!  After a couple months of being quite quiet (other than laughs, screams and squeals) Cali has started proper babbling. I think once she mastered crawling and pulling to stand, she was able to focus on making noise again.  Bababababa, lalalala, dadada, and on and on.   It's really cute.  Except when she should be sleeping!

Working on clapping and dancing.  One day she just started clapping out of nowhere and it's now become a multiple times a day thing.  And whenever she's standing, if she hears music she does a little jouncy dance.  It's just too cute.

Enjoying time with her sister.  Seeing these two together makes all the tough times of having a baby and toddler totally worth it.  It's so easy to see how much they love each other and it melts my heart.

Cali's first time on the swings!

Kisses for big sister

Ball pit tent!

Eating, eating, eating! Baby led weaning is going great.  Cali loves to eat!  She'll try anything and we've yet to find something she doesn't like.  She loves making a mess (though not as much as Ceci did) and unlike Ceci she gets lazy at times at the end of a meal and likes when I feed her off my plate (though I just hold my fork out to her and she moves to it and takes a bite).  I think she just gets tired of having to work for it!  Haha.  She also has two bottom teeth now, so this has opened up a whole new world of crunching through foods.

  

Sleeping..sort of.  We've had a bit of rough patch recently where Cali's up every 1.5-2.5 hrs throughout the night to eat.  And acting like she's starving!  I think it's a combination of a growth spurt, teething, learning so much at once and becoming super distracted during the day (now that she can move everywhere she's not at all interested in nursing for more than a couple minutes at a time during the day).  We're working on it as best we can but if she's hungry, I'll feed her.  And thankfully, she just wakes, eats and goes right back to bed.  So all in all not too bad (we've only had one or two middle of the night parties where she won't go back to sleep ...knock on wood... something Ceci did a lot) and we really can't complain. She also naps well and on a pretty good schedule.  Right now she's still on three naps, all with about 2 hours of wake time before them, give or take.  Usually she's up for the day around 7-7:30, takes a morning nap at 9ish for about an hour, then an afternoon nap at about 12:30 or so for 1.5-2 and then an evening nap around 5pm is 30min before bed at 7-7:30ish.  But there's a lot of fluidity there, especially when we have to work around picking Ceci up from school or going to a class/playgroup or Ceci's schedule of eating/sleeping.  Usually, when I'm lucky, Cali's afternoon nap lines up with Ceci's afternoon nap (#momgoals), which is amazing, and allows me to get a lot of work done.  But again, this does not always happen.  We're probably moving towards dropping the 3rd nap soon, but she's just not ready to stay awake that long yet (we tried it the other night and though she did OK staying up a bit longer and then going to bed a bit earlier, she woke up at 8pm ready to play as if it was just a nap...no fun).

Passed out

We just love this little nugget so much.  She's silly and serious all at the same time and is such a joy and a blessing to our family.  We are loving getting to know her personality.

Here are the best outtakes and alternates from our 8 month photo shoot:

And of course, here's her 8 month video!