Hunter: 9 months

Yikes, Hunter is closer to 10 months now than 9 months.  Guess it’s time for his update!

It seemed like so much of this month was focused on sleep.  Both bedtime sleep training and nighttime sleep training are done and still going well!  He consistently sleeps anywhere from 10-12 hours a night.  I find that if he’s going to sleep 12, he’ll wake around 5:45am to eat then go back to sleep for another 1.5-2 hours.  This morning I actually decided to just stay up instead of trying to go back to sleep to have a little bit of morning productive time.

While he sleeps great at night, naps are a different story.  I think he’s in the process of transitioning from 3 to 2 naps.  He naps in the late morning around 10:30am, then again in the afternoon sometime between 1-2pm.  His evening cat nap is hit or miss lately. If he naps, it’s a short one around 4:30-5pm.

Hunter is definitely a cat napper, usually lasting 20-45 minutes.  It’s really rare that he naps longer than that, but it has happened on occasion (Saturday marked a 1.5 hour morning nap!).  I guess if I had to pick I’d much rather have a good nighttime sleeper, and a not so good day time napper.  He tends to cry more for naps than bedtime, and never gets in a comfortable position.  Maybe once he’s fully transitioned to 2 naps they will change again.  We’ll see.  I can’t complain though, since he’s a super happy kid throughout the day and not overtired, so he must be getting enough sleep as he needs.

When Hunter was a little baby we used to give him naked time… and we still do to this day.  After bath, before bed, I’ll let him roam around naked for a bit.  It’s pretty cute and thankfully he doesn’t pee on the carpet that often.

We’re down to 4-5 nursing sessions a day now, and he eats solids 4 times a day. I try and have him always eat solids first now, since we’re at the stage where he’s getting most of his nutrition from solids and less from breast milk.

Here’s what it looks like:

5:45am nurse (this is the biggest nursing session of the day) *

7:45am breakfast, then nurse around 8:15am

11:15am nurse, then lunch around 11:30am (normally I have to nurse first since I have to leave to teach)

2:30pm afternoon snack, then nurse around 3pm

5:30pm dinner

7pm final nursing of the day

* If he wakes around 6:30am for the day I’ll nurse him when he wakes, then do breakfast about an hour later, combining those 5:45 and 8:15am nursings into 1, which gives us 4 nursing sessions for the day.

Hunter is such a good eater.  He loves food and eats a big variety of foods.  Still, his favorites are avocado, banana, cheese and black beans for sure.  He really likes meat too.  Anytime I give him beef or chicken he gobbles it up.

I am finding that my milk supply is starting to decrease, which is okay since he’s not needing as much.  On the days he only nurses 4 times, I’ll pump at 10pm before going to bed.  I tend to only get about 1 ounce then.

Some of his favorite things

Swinging in the sunshine, and going on walks.

Crawling like a torpedo.  He decides where he wants to go, and charges full speed with his head down!  Yes, it does result in him running into things, head first.  I’m sure it makes him more wind resistant crawling that way though. 😉

Pulling up to stand, then testing his balance limits.  He’s officially starting to let go and stand on his own for a few seconds at a time now.

Books.  He looooooooves books.  We can easily sit through 5-6 books and typically it stops because I’m tired of reading. 🙂 He gets really into just sitting, listening and looking.

Evenings have become such a funny time with Hunter.  After dinner, something switches in him and he’s insanely energized and go-go-go.  Even more so than during the day.  He’ll do laps around the living room and through the kitchen.   He has a ball and smiles like crazy.  Jacob and I just laugh and soak it all in.

We still do baths in his little tub.  I tried a bath in the actual tub over the weekend, and he was sooooo scared (he’s had one before than resulted in a water face plant).  He kept standing up, which was a no-no.  Maybe because his feet would slip easily that made him scared?  We’re going to get a grippy mat to keep him from slipping.  I ended up getting in the bath with him, which was the only was he was okay with it.

Hunter still has zero teeth.  He’s had 1 top tooth barely poking through for a couple months now.

He knows the word ‘no’ very well as we teach him not to get into things around the house.  We really didn’t do much baby proofing, other than putting up a gate.

At his 9 month check up he weighed 19 pounds, 4 ounces.  His height was 27.5 inches.  He’ still right on track with his 25th percentile weight chart and somewhere between 25-50th percentile in height.  My little boy just keeps on growing.

I think we’ll have a walker before 1 year, but we’ll see!

When did your kids begin walking?  That’s when the real craziness will begin. 🙂

Happy Monday everyone.

Heather