Young Mommy & Wife

July 3, 2008 (Venily is 8 months, 2 weeks, 6 days old)

Venily updates:

I STILL haven't gotten Venily's 8 month pictures taken!! Ahhh! I only have 10 more days and then she'll be 9 months! I need to go soon and we are SOOO busy, I don't know if it will happen!

I am always amazed at how much Venily understands me! She knows what I'm saying and it's so nice to know that- she's so smart! She doesn't always listen when I tell her not to do something (actually she usually laughs and tries to do it as fast as she can before I can stop her) but it's nice to be understood by the one person I talk to ALL day long! :) I can't even explain how happy it makes me!

She dances now!!! It's so funny she starts dancing when she moves a toy and it plays music! Tooooo cute!

Venily has been sleeping HORRIBLY lately! She naps fine. Still 3 a day, and for a decent amount of time (I tried getting it to 2, but she just wasn't having that!). But at night, she has THE WORST sleeping habits ever! First of all.... I can't put her down awake. I also usually have to feed her to sleep or bounce her on my lap until she falls asleep. Then she'll sleep for like 30min to an hour and wake up again. And when she wakes up, she stands up in her crib and gets progressively louder, demanding that she be picked up, lol! She does this like 5 times before she finally falls to real sleep. THEN....she wakes up in the night and as soon as I pick her back up, she falls asleep but when I go to put her back down, she wakes up again!! Ahhh! I would LOVE to just let her "cry it out" but we have people sleeping right above us and Jason has to get up early for work and also strongly disapproves of letting her cry! It's driving me crazy! Some nights I refuse to feed her in the middle of the night (which is what I read that I'm supposed to do) but other nights I'm so tired, I just do it anyway! I don't like carrying her around in the middle of the night, b/c I'm so tired, I'm afraid that I'll drop her. She ends up sleeping with us most nights as well. I'm hoping that when we move into our new house I'll be able to get a better handle on the whole "sleep training" thing! I miss my baby who used to sleep through the night EVERY night! Where did she go? HA! AND, she now wakes up at 6:00am every morning and NOTHING I do will get her back to sleep! She NEVER used to get up that early. It was always 7:30-8:00 when she'd wake up! She still wakes up soooo happy though, but I wish she'd sleep a little better and a little longer!

She cruises so good now, I know that she will definitely be walking at 10 months! She cruises all along the table, couchs, chairs... and can go from the table to the couch, no problem! Sometimes she even lets go while she's doing it! She also walks really good with her rolling lion. She got her first major bump yesterday though! She was standing at the coffee table and fell and I heard a hard bump and knew it couldn't have been good. She cried a little bit and I picked her up and she was fine. A little while later though, I looked at her head and there was a HUGE bump and bruise on her forehead. :( Didn't seem to bother her though... I tried to put frozen vegetables on it, lol, but she just wanted to play with them.

Venily likes to splash in the tub now. It's funny! :)

She's starting to learn to "share" things!!! We always try to get her to feed us food or give us a toy and usually she only teases us with it, haha! Like she'll be holding onto a Cheerio and I'll open up my mouth and tell her I'm hungry and I want that Cheerio and she'll smile and start putting her hand close to my mouth but before I can eat it, she'll pull her hand back really fast and put it in HER mouth! HAHA! OR we'll tell her to give us a piece of food that she's eating and she'll REALLY QUICKLY start shoving them ALL into her mouth so we can't have them, LOL! But recently she'll give us a toy if we ask for it and then we'll give it back to her and ask for it again and she'll give it back... etc., etc., so that's good!

She's such a little flirt! She loves seeing people and she loves smiling and then gets shy when someone smiles and talks back to her. It's too cute!

Venily pretty much eats ALL real food now!! Some entire days go by and I won't give her any baby food (I hate having to force her to eat it when she doesn't want it!). She eats (broken up into small bites).... spaghetti w/ sauce, veggie dogs, mashed potatoes, chunks of fruit, sandwiches, macoronni and cheese, green beans, waffles, yogurt, quesadillas.... pretty much anything that I eat, I'll let her eat! And she LOVES it! And it's not as expensive. I can buy a bag of frozen squares of organic squash for less than the same amount of organic baby food squash. So that's nice... but I won't let her eat anything bad for her.... like anything chocolatey, sugary, or salty (though Daddy likes to try and sneak some to her).

We have a lot of parades and parties and things to go to this weekend for the 4th of July!!! I'm really hoping that Venily likes the fireworks! She LOVES seeing them on the computer screen and I know she'd really like seeing them but yesterday she was getting a little worried about the thunder (she had a very concerned look on her face every time she heard it) so I'm hoping the noise of them doesn't scare her!