Eight Months

Eight months.
Nearly eight months without sleeping through the night.
Three large plastic bins of already too-small clothes.
Three diaper sizes.
Over a thousand diapers.
Several thousand pictures.
Lots of news stages.
Tons of excitement for each.
One baby boy.
Inmeasurable joy.

Our little Caleb really is our joy.  We can't wait to spend Christmas with him, even though he won't really understand it!  I just know he'll like wrapping paper and all the attention.

In that first video, you can hear his two favorite noises as of late: the inhale sqwack and tounge bubbles.  He's so cute.  For some reason, I can't get any other videos or pictures to load into this post, so ... in the next post's video, you can see Caleb's amazing mode of transportation: ROLLING!  His latest feat with rolling is exiting one room and going into another.  He really likes the roll.  The only sad part about it is that sometimes by the end of the day he has a minor rug burn on the back of his head from rubbing against the carpet on each roll. So sad!

He still just has his two bottom teeth.  His top front two did desend quite a bit - you can feel the bumps they created on his gums, but they seemed to have just stopped.  When they started moving I kept praying that I'd be able to keep nursing and that his sleep would recover soon (teething messes it all up!), thinking that his teeth would just move down fast.  But I guess Heavenly Father's solution was to just stop them in their tracks!  Which is fine by me!

Last Friday night we employeed our very first teenage babysitter.  Of course I was a little nervous, even though she's fabulous.  Tyler fed him a bottle and put him to sleep all week in preparation the big event.  (Usually I nurse him to sleep.)  And it worked!  And we had a good evening.  But at the end of the night report the babysitter told me, "Your baby is so chill.  I could hardly get him to smile!  Every now and again he'd look up at me and just tear up."  Oh well that just broke my heart.  He missed us!!

Caleb's eating SO MUCH BETTER than he used to!  Suddenly, he no longer gags when fed oatmeal, which is very good since it's vitamin-fortified.  He is a terrific banana eater - he eats 1/3 to 1/2 of a banana each day.  He can even take bites out of it himself (although I don't usually let him because then he grabs the peel and wants to eat that too... yuck!).  He likes bits of bread, Ritz crackers, baby rice crackers, baby cookies, puffs, most baby food fruits, no baby food vegetables, and he drinks about a tablespoon of water out of a cup each day (with help).  And of course he nurses.  That's still his favorite.

He still really likes music. Classical in the car almost always puts him to sleep.

He's truly ticklish now - in the sense that pretty much no matter what time of day it is or what kind of mood he's in, if you get the right spot(s), he'll laugh.  I love it!  The sweet spots are: his neck, his collar bones (I mean it, right on the bone!), his inner thighs, and his lower belly.  Hearing him laugh is my favorite thing in the world.

He also likes repetative games we make up with him.  They usually get him giggling.  I always wonder if he gets excited by them because he knows what's coming, and he just really likes that he has figured out how to know what's coming next.

He's also started to interact with other babies, a little - okay at least notice they exist when we're together.

And he really knows us.  He lights up when either of us walk in a room, which is nice since we've been lighting up when we see him for a good eight months now.