Seven Months!

Okay, all you Walt fans out there -- the official seven-month picture is finally posted in the Birthday Album -- knock yourselves out!  Also, there's a new album with a few more pictures from Murray this weekend.

Since this blog is pretty much serving as Walt's baby book (the cute one is still sitting in its box in the closet with only the family tree filled in), I've decided I'd better start recording his monthly developments here.  Sorry if it's boring, but I'm sure the curators of his presidential library will appreciate my efforts.  So . . .

Walt is really starting to develop his own little personality.  He is very calm and laid back -- quite content to sit and play with his toys (especially his favorite Winnie the Pooh rattle) and watch Evie.  Nothing is better than watching Evie.  All of his teachers at Mother's Day Out and the church nursery always comment on what an easy baby he is.  And I have to agree.  Until he starts getting sleepy, he never really fusses. 

He started babbling with consonants this month -- bababa, gagaga, and (Josh's favorite) dadada.  He still refuses to roll from his back to his front, or spend more than ten seconds on his tummy unless he's staring at himself in the mirror at daycare.  So, I'm guessing he may be a little bit on the late side in terms of crawling, but after watching Collier this weekend, I think I'm glad about that!

Walt started eating some solid foods shortly before his six month birthday, but since then, he has added lots of new foods to his menu, which currently includes, rice cereal, peas, sweet potatoes, green beans, squash, apples, pears, bananas, prunes, chicken and as of today, turkey.  (Also, a grape popsicle one time when Mommy wasn't looking.)  He seems to like pretty much everything but the green beans.  Not a big fan of those.

As for sleep, this was the month we did the dreaded "cry it out".  Walt has been sleeping through the night since he was about ten weeks old, but I'd always nursed him to sleep and then gingerly put him down, praying he wouldn't wake up in the process.  Usually, this resulted in him waking up 30 minutes to an hour later and being unable to put himself back to sleep.  Thus, more rocking, nursing, etc.  We finally decided to bite the bullet and start putting him down awake, right after his bath.  The first night he cried about forty minutes (which was awful), the second about fifteen, and the third about two.  Since then, he usually turns over on his side and starts babbling himself to sleep before we even get out of the room.  I say "usually" because we still have some nights where he cries for 5-15 minutes, but as Josh commented the other night (about him going to sleep), "He knows how to do it better than we do."  I thought that was a very good way to put it.  And we're even getting there with naps.  Whereas Walt had been just a catnapper, taking daytime snoozes of no more than 30 minutes, since we started putting him down awake and letting him put himself to sleep instead of rocking him, he's napping for an hour or more most of the time.  This afternoon, I had to wake him up from a two hour nap at 5:00.  Must have been the tryptophan in his turkey at lunch.

So, that's our Walty in a nutshell.  I mean, he's not actually in a nutshell.  That would be a very big nutshell.  Yeah.