"Hey guys, what are you doing? Can I play too?!"
"Look at me! I can pull up to stand!" (Her mother is heard softly crying in the background.)
The typical view of Hannah these days.
More climbing...
The dishwasher. I have a feeling this is not the last of these types of photos!
Hannah is now 8 months old. I'm not sure how that happened. I blinked and months on the calendar flew by! She is such a big little girl. She went from sitting to crawling in about a week. And this basically happened the week she turned 8 months. Apparently she didn't get the memo that we were not ready for her to be this mobile. The boys are adjusting to her mobility, slowly. They need to be
constantly reminded to not play games on the floor and leave paper, shoes, or well, anything on the floor because their sister WILL eat it. She also immediately went from crawling to pulling herself to standing. Holy cow. She's going to be walking in another week at this rate!
Hannah is still an excellent sleeper and if we are home, she will on average take two, two-hour naps during the day and then sleep all night. (Now if we could get Jonathan to sleep through the night, we'd be all set, but that's a whole other post.)
This month she really took off in the eating real food department. She will usually devour a whole 2
nd foods container at lunch and dinner. And then eat her body weight in puffs or graham crackers. She loves to feed herself. Hannah really wants to be big like her brothers!
Hannah is not making any of the normal baby sounds like
dada, gaga, or
baba, etc. So, yesterday I met with a speech therapist to talk about ways to help Hannah with her tongue thrust issues. If you look at every picture of Hannah, she is smiling or fake smiling and her tongue is out. This looks cute but is actually a problem. And it was mostly likely the cause of her eating/gaining issues at birth. And now it is affecting her ability to verbalize. It's not a serious problem yet, but left untreated could cause her serious speech problems later plus orthodontic issues. So, I came home armed with new tools and exercises to try to help "wake-up" Hannah's mouth and tongue muscles.
A lot of what the therapist talked about reminded me of sensory processing issues, only it is all focused on the mouth. One thing we need to work on with Hannah is introducing lots of textures. She is getting better with this, but when I first tried to give her real food, she gagged a lot. The therapist said this was normal, but to keep introducing them. She also gave me a little vibrating tooth brush for infants. It made me a little twitchy to hold it, but when I gave it to Hannah, she loved it and her whole body relaxed as she chewed on it.
The therapist also said that babies with tongue thrust often like extremes, like pickles or lemons. I thought that might be fun to try. So last night at dinner, I gave Hannah a little taste of my dill pickle. The girl went nuts for it! She screeched when I took it away. CRAZY! She sucked out ALL of the juice of the pickle. Great. Now I have to fight off another kid for my pickle at restaurants. Although, if it helps her, I'll sacrifice my pickle!
Happy 8-month birthday sweet girl. And once again, I'd like to remind you - slow down! There is no need to grow up quite so fast.
Andrew with his new fish before they perished. Sadly the first batch of fish from Wal-mart only lasted about an hour. Not sure what happened to them. I guess they listened to the noise, saw that their new home was in the playroom and decided they didn't have the will to live at our house. The second group is still swimming strong - 4 days later! The best part was that the death of the fish was not nearly the drama I thought it might be. Andrew just sort of shrugged his shoulders and said, "They died." And that was the end of that. So I took those sad dead fish back to the store and told them they died on my son's 6th birthday and they gave me new fish without a blink a bonus one, just in case.
At long last, let the ripping begin. We made the poor boy wait until daddy got home from work. We won't be doing that again! It made for a VERY long day for all parties involved. And even after the long wait, he let Jonathan help him unwrap one.
A Birthday for Bear book and a new GoFish guys CD, Splash!
Tiny Legos! Just what he wanted, but they pose a serious choking hazard for Hannah.
And the hit of the day...Rescue Heroes! We had to do some searching for these. Thanks to Craigslist and a kid's consignment shop, we found them. Leave it to our child to pick a toy no longer in production.
Daddy demonstrating to the boys the cool features of the helicopter.
This was Andrew's dinner request. Pancakes with a face. But not just any face. He was very specific about what other foods should be on the face. He even drew us a picture several days before his birthday to make sure we were clear as to what he wanted for his birthday dinner. We were able to add the bacon without pre-approval. But really, who needs approval to add bacon?!
