Teddy's crawling has taken back seat to more of a bum shuffle, which sees him whizzing around our wooden floors at a scary speed. His favourite activities now including chasing Pablo into corners, trying to put his hands in cat food and messing with any exposed wires. A Health Visitor's dream! Now that Teddy can move around freely, he is understandably less interested in sitting in one spot and playing with his toys and books. Consequently I spend a lot of time following him around, especially to and from his toy box as he contemplates what he would like to play with for all of two minutes. It looks like he is as indecisive as his Mother!
Teddy has started to pull himself up on the sofa, or on us, and if we hold his hands he can also manage a few wobbly steps. He gets very excited by this, although to be fair so do we! He especially likes to pull himself up if we are eating on the sofas, as demonstrated below. A minute after that picture was taken he pinched my Yorkshire pudding! At least we know he has good taste :-). I don't think walking will be too far off, which terrifies and pleases me in equal measure. Chris started walking at 10 months so this plus the fact that Teddy has always seemed to have strong legs makes me think he may be an early starter too. I'll probably be proved completely wrong about this! Either way I really should tick off the 'buy stair gates' item which has been on my to do list for a good few weeks now.
Sleeping has been... interesting this month. I know that we are still very lucky to have a child that sleeps through the night for the vast majority of the time but it is the actual getting Teddy to sleep which is the problem. For his day time naps I used to put Teddy down awake and leave him to drift off unaided. Now that he can sit up this has gone out of the window! Once I put him down and leave him, unless he is completely shattered, he immediately sits up to either play with his cot toys (writing this one obvious step seems to be to remove those!), throw his dummy across the room and either cry or sing! Consequently I now rock Teddy to sleep on the rocking chair in the nursery and, whilst this isn't setting a great precedent, I must admit I love those moments especially with my return to work looming closely on the horizon.
Bedtime is fairly similar, once we have got Teddy into his Grobag (a mission and a half) cue numerous trips upstairs to retrieve his dummy or lie him back down. Eventully he will get so sleepy that he will fall asleep, and not too infrequently this will be sat up! I think it is just his age and realisation that we are in the room one minute and gone the next. Perhaps we should see it as a good thing that he wants to be near us! If I stand next to him and stroke his cheek he will happily lie still for eternity, but I am keen for him to realise he has to go to sleep by himself. Plus that wrecks my back!
I am sure the textbooks would be screaming 'controlled crying' to me at this point and berating us for going upstairs whenever he cries. Don't get me wrong, we don't go in immediately but I just dont think the controlled crying is for us. Teddy seems too young to be left alone upset for any significant period of time, plus all the running up and down the stairs will hopefully help me to fit back into my work wardrobe! I am treating this as just as phase which will hopefully pass like the rest, and as I say it's not all bad given once he is asleep he is generally out for the count until 8am. He is not going to be happy when nursery calls for a much earlier start!
This past month has also seen Teddy master the art of waving (usually the double hander), throwing his arms into the air when we say "how big is Teddy?" which my Mum can take credit for, and a very cute squint as he tries to copy us when we blink at him. It is ridiculous how proud each of these developments makes me. The little things hey!
That's all for now, roll on 11 months! x
No comments:
Post a Comment