Newsletter: Month 10

Dear Ian, Yesterday you turned 10 months old and it's been a month full of change. Despite the warnings of BabyCenter.com telling us that we should keep you to a set routine, we carted you all over the east coast to several conferences and visiting friends. You've been to Syracuse, Oswego, New York City!, Washington DC and Maryland.

You've been to Central Park to play in the fountains and swing on the swings. You've ridden in a yellow cab (with no car seat!), you've toured an upstate college, you've seen a movie that your father and I haven't even seen (Happy Feet) and didn't even ruin the ending for us. You've gone to the National Zoo twice and saw primates and reptiles and other cute babies. You saw your first baseball game at Nationals park and you've splashed in the rivers of Maryland.

You've also had little to no schedule during all of it and taken it all in stride. There was the night we went to the ball game you'd only had two 15 minute naps all day and didn't go to sleep until 10:30pm. There was the night I took you back to the parties at BlogHer and you did great until the dance music got a little too loud. And there was the day you flew home with just me and were a model baby in flight, impressing everyone around us.

But you also worried us a bit with your first stint of night terrors. For about two weeks you would scream about every hour on the hour and nothing would console you. After nine and a half months of blissful sleep, we were not used to this! But thankfully once we stopped traveling, "all that screaming stuff" as your Grandma said went away.

You sleep like a champ, but it kinda stinks that you're going to bed so early. Just today you fell asleep in the car on the way home at 7pm. Since you also fall asleep shortly after I come to nurse you at lunch we don't get to hang out as much. But I'm hoping it's just a phase and you'll stay up a little longer for us.

As of a few days ago, you are on the "toddler schedule" at day care. I was resistant to it at first, not wanting to rush you into something you weren't ready for, but you basically put yourself onto this schedule. All your friends are doing it so I'm sure you'd feel left out if you weren't sleeping when they slept and eating when they eat. So we're going with it. It just means I have to pack you a morning snack for 8:30 (what I would call breakfast), lunch for 11 and another snack for 2pm after your noon-2pm nap.

This also means we're not nursing as much. Just today you ignored both of your bottles at day care and only nursed when I show up at noon. It's a little bittersweet in that I am happy to not have to pump at work anymore, but I will miss our nursing sessions. I'll also miss the 600 extra calories worth of food I've been eating every day! I think we're at a phase now, though, that you've figured out you don't want a bottle anymore but you'll take a boob whenever you can. You nursed a lot this last weekend but didn't bother with any bottles today. That's something I can totally understand and we can work with that. Just today I nursed you while we wandered the aisles of the grocery store and we were both able to multi-task.

You're crawling everywhere with exceptional speed and you're pulling up on things and even able to take a few steps if holding on to something or someone. Everyone says you'll be walking before you're a year old and I tend to believe them. You still don't have a single tooth, but we're not letting that stop us from trying out every food we can find. Your appetite has grown as much as your body has and I'm going to have to start ordering you your own meals at dinner versus sharing mine because I'm losing a fair amount off my plate! This doesn't bode well for the teenage years.

You're still as happy as ever and have never met a stranger. You are an ambassador for babies all the world over and I'm happy to share you with others so they can experience how cool it is to hang out with you. You're getting bigger and bigger every day in so many ways and I have to steel myself for when I can't hog you all to myself.

But while we were at BlogHer this year, our friend Alana wrote us a poem. I asked her to write something about how you were the world's best baby and so exceptionally good in all the crazy places I'd taken you. She wrote:

9 month old SUPERSTAR you are the world's too soon but you are mine, all mine

Love, Mama