Saturday, April 27, 2013

7 & 8 months

I had written a post for last month but never got around to actually posting it so I'm combining the updates for last month and this month.

There was a court hearing earlier this week and birth mom is doing all the right things to get her back. This might be our last three month period with her depending on how fast they do the transition. It's a bittersweet thing. I really want to believe in the mom, but I find it challenging when the stakes are so high.

In happier news, she had her first sibling visit. Can you see the resemblance? They were all just so stink'n adorable I wanted to bring them home. Her siblings are all adopted by two different families. Girls with one family and the boys with the other.
Baby Bear is 8 months old now and wow has she changed from the last update I posted! Last time I blogged she had been screaming for up to 2 hours at bedtime in her loudest voice possible. She thankfully doesn't do that anymore! For the first time in her life sleep was no longer an issue. She had been sleeping through the night for a glorious two months, and going to sleep beautifully. However, a few weeks ago she started crying after every sleep cycle like she used to do when she was 2 months old. She'd cry at 12, 2, 4, and sometimes 6. Last night was the first time she slept through the night in 3 weeks. Let's hope that phase is done!
She's not crawling yet, but she is not stationary either. She is a pro at rolling around and scooting backwards so she is never in the same spot where I left her.
She likes to "dance" to songs and music by wiggling back and forth. It's super cute! She loves to look for us if we hide or play peek-a-boo. She just recently started playing peek-a-boo with her bib. She'll hold her bib over her face and then lower it when I say "where is Baby?".  Super cute!  She recognizes at least a few words that we know of including "mommy", "mika", and "milk". She's working on her pincer grasp and is pretty good about picking up small objects like cheerios. Baby even uses a real chewing motion now. Her newest skills are clapping her hands and waving bye-bye. She will do each on command. She also likes to clap her hands when her singing toys sings "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands".
She has also been pointing to pictures in books for the past month or so. She loves to point out all the cartoon babies in a certain book and is most excited to point to them on the pages they are really tiny or almost hidden. The smaller the picture of the baby the more fun it is to point to I guess. She also loves to point to pictures of farm animals and then wait to see what kind of noise I make for them. And dogs! Any book there is a dog in, she will find it and point to it. It's so fun to watch her discover things. She's really grown a lot mentally in the last two months. She feels much more like a real little person now rather than a tiny baby. You can see those wheels turning inside as she figures things out.