Eight Months

Braden is eight months old.  That's 2/3rds of a year--or 66%.  He gets a D at being one year old!

We love that little drooly man to pieces.  Braden is only sometimes sleeping through the night. Boo.  I'm not sure if it's teething or his love for me, but he's waking up once to eat in the wee hours of the morning.  He sleeps until about 8:30 and takes two or three naps.  And he normally goes down around 7:45.  He's a good sitter and tends to only topple over when he means to.  Still no scooting or crawling--just wild rolling and sometimes wiggling backwards.  He does get up on his hands and knees and bounces a little--but that's it.  Yesterday he tried really hard to clap his hands and it was a-dor-able.

He's pretty good with his pincher grasp--maybe due to our baby led weaning?  He's doing great eating the chunks of food we've been serving him.  He likes pancakes, bananas, avocado, sweet potato, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, french fries and noodles.  He's a little harder to spoon feed than Finley was--mostly because he's not used to someone feeding him.  Braden really loves Finley and is interested in what he's doing.  Finley can almost always make him giggle.  He started lifting his arms up when you go to pick him up and is becoming a little more helpful in getting his arms through his sleeves.  He makes some consonant noise and babbles a bit--and laughs a lot when you tickle him.

This is Finley's serious face.  Don't mess with him.  Seriously.  He'll cut you.  Finley is just more and more a hoot every day.  He's obsessed with Sol's coffee pot.  He runs to see Sol everytime when he opens the door and says, "Daddy! Like to play with me?"  He throws some wicked tantrums for reasons that we do not understand.  For example, today I said, "Finley, are those your spices?" and that threw him into a tailspin.  It was rough.  He's doing great with the potty training--last night he jumped out of the tub on his own, did his business and flushed it before we knew anything had happened.  He's very independent and becoming more articulate.  It cracks me up when he says, "Well, actually..."  Bedtime has become more and more complicated as he becomes sneakier and sneakier.  It's like a poker game where we don't know if he's actually bluffing about needing to poop...

Sol and I were looking over Finley's posts from 8 months on and it was crazy how fast they start growing--soon Braden's going to be pulling up and walking and taking Finley's toys. Oh boy.



BROTHERS! Best pals for life.