Ellie Grace: 7 months

7 Months! We're on the upswing to a year already. I swear I blinked and this last month flew by. It has been a sweet month of spending time as a family and watching Ellie learn as she discovers her surroundings. There are more nights than not that we hold our sweet sleeping little girl in our arms and say "When did she get so big?" She's become a pro at sitting up and playing for extended periods of time, and rolls and scootches around (often needing to be rescued from under a coffee table or chair). She started eating solids (5/4), rode in a shopping cart (4/30), sleeping in her crib at night (4/29), went swimming at the pool (4/30), and "waves" (probably just opening and closing her hand to her, but it's still cute). One morning (5/6) she started babbling noises that we hadn't heard before and they sounded an awful lot like mamamamama. I took a quick video on my shoddy phone, and Jake confirmed it. Just a couple days ago (5/19) we heard her start saying dadddaada. We thought her giggles were awesome, but that almost took the cake. We went to storytime at the library, on lots of walks, to First Thursday in downtown Portland, First Friday in Newberg, to the zoo with her cousins, aunt & nonna, to Eugene, yardsaling, and celebrated mother's day by driving to the beach for the day as a family. When we started solids, I started giving it to her in between her 5:00 and 8:00 feeding (at kind of dinner time). Ellie slurped down rice cereal when we first gave it to her, but trying peas (mixed with rice cereal and breastmilk-5/15) and even applesauce (mixed in with the peas, rice cereal and breastmilk-5/18) has been a different story. She keeps her lips pursed and we can barely sneak in any bites. As soon as it's in she makes horrible gagging faces and spits it out. She's having no issues with growing (we're talking belly & leg rolls for miles) so we're not worried about it. Sleep wise she was sleeping through the night from about 8:00ish to 6:30ish, then eating and going back to sleep until 9 for the longest time. During our visit to Eugene a couple days ago she started waking up at midnight and 4 and a few times in between and not settling back in unless I fed her (usually at the 4:00 wake up). We're hoping now that we're back home she'll fall back into her old routine. She's still on a 4 hour routine as far as eating goes- she eats, is awake for 2 hours, sleeps for (roughly) 2 hours, then repeats. It's been working out great for us! We love our little girl and look forward to another great month with her!