Eliza, eight months

Oh, baby! What a month. Hands up; who replaced tiny Eliza with a miniature person? She’s growing up – and crawling – at a lightening speed and it seems there’s a new development every single day. It actually all feels like a lot more fun now, especially on a good night’s sleep, and it’s amazing to watch the whole world unfold in front of her.

And talking of sleep, it does seem like this month more than any I’ve been SO TIRED. I know being a parent means you’ll basically always be tired – of course, right? – but recent teething-related activity resulted in multiple wakings, all on top of eight months of getting up at least once in the night. It seemed to really catch up with me.

Yet the payoff for the bad has been the universe of good things; crawling, crawling really quickly, clapping, laughing lots, actual teeth, always moving and moving and being curious about everything. So on balance, I’ll take the tiredness (although this post has taken a while to write and I think we may have turned a corner with more recent good nights than bad; I’m no longer fantasising about the sleep cure clinic from The Valley of the Dolls).

So here’s eight things about my eight-and-a-bit-month-old:

• There’s a crowded calcium convention going on in her mouth. Tooth one caught us completely by surprise and tooth two followed shortly after, and was no less of a shock. Tooth three – top front – was last week’s newest unexpected visitor in her mouth (you’d think we’d be used to it by now, but no…)
• Attracted, as all babies seem to be, by the exotic lure of the forbidden, her new favourite places to crawl to and hang out are the TV stand (I recently watched her make her way to Alex’s PlayStation, turn it on, remove the game and lick it) and the bookcase, where she’s just discovered how much fun it is to pull the books out. Again and again
• So we’ve done a mammoth amount of child-proofing this month, as well as lower the cot after she figured out that she could stand up in it. Yikes
• Although she’s been doing the incoherent baby babble for a while now, dada was probably her first recognisable word-sound…
• …followed shortly by her second, the much-repeated bob (no idea why!)

Eliza, you’re brilliant. Bring on month nine (which is in about ten days, it’s taken me a while to get round to writing this…)

Eliza, six months

Eliza, five months

Eliza, three months

Eliza, one month