7 months already!

By the time this is posted, Jay will officially be 7 months old!

Being a cutie with "uncle" Steven

7 months... wow! It's September already... where did summer go?!

Jay's been sitting up, playing with his toys pretty well these days and can stand by himself with minimal spotting. He also LOVES tearing into my (already read) magazines that live under our end tables. It's official - our front room, while I would have liked to have kept it as a nice living room, is actually just a nice family room since we spend a lot of time up here as it's carpeted for Jay to play on and his toys keep finding a way out of his room into here (he has almost no toys to play with in his room as they're all currently residing in the family room, lol...). He was moving along quite well in his walker tonight too, speeding back and forth across the kitchen. He gets mad I won't let him pull over the trash can though (it's got a pop-up lid so it has to stay out).

He LOVES shows with puppets in them too, I've noticed - for some reason they catch his attention and he'll just sit and watch them the whole time they're on the screen.

Crawling under the coffee table

He loves to jump too - lately he's been quite the jumping jack, if you stand him up (and hold onto him) on a flat/hard surface he'll often start jumping like crazy, lol...

He can't completely crawl properly yet, but he does this military-like crawl where he pushes and pulls himself all over the place. This afternoon I left him sitting with his toys in the family room while I went in the kitchen to get his dinner ready. As we're in the separation anxiety phase, he soon realized I left the family room and started crying, so I called to him from the kitchen so he would know I was just around the corner. I went to go get him to put him in his high chair and there he is, doing his form of crawling and halfway between where I left him and the kitchen, like he was coming to see where I went, lol...

Sitting in the shopping cart like a big boy!

He enjoys trying new foods/tastes too - he got some ice cream cake at my birthday and loved that, daddy let him lick a cool ranch Dorito and he liked that, he liked the candy daddy let him lick tonight... we gave him a little bit of plain steamed rice which he seemed curious about. He also eats the Gerber Graduates Puffs in Strawberry Apple for a snack sometimes too (my friend let us try the banana organic ones her little girl eats - he didn't seem to like the banana flavor too much though, despite him eating banana baby food). He loves Apple and Strawberry and Grape tasting things though!

He likes to make some pretty funny noises too - his latest enjoyment is rapidly smacking his lips and the noise that makes, daddy taught him that and he gets such a kick out of other people doing it after he starts doing it, lol...

He also likes "playing" with blocks - ie: you build them up, he knocks them and makes them go "boom!" He's also riding in shopping carts now like a big boy - he LOVES being able to sit and see everything at his eye-level rather than ride in his carrier on top of the cart (which by the way, he's almost too big for his carrier now too - he has less than 5lbs til he's over the weight limit!)

Playing blocks with mommy

He also seems to understand teeth brushing, as we added that to his bedtime routine recently - he knows when I put the toothbrush to his mouth to open up for me =)

And also, I noticed tonight, when his head was back while I was changing him that his top 2 front teeth are in! The right one is all the way through and about halfway fully in while the other you can just see the tip of the whiteness broken through! So 7 months old and 4 teeth already! I knew he was getting a few more in soon, as he was really tired earlier this week and the last day or so he hasn't been finishing his bottles completely either like normal.

A day in our regular routine goes like this:

• Jay wakes up between 930 and 1045am, I change his diaper and bring him over to our bed to snuggle with me for a bit, putting on PBS (Sesame Street is on from 10-11am so he usually watches that while I hold onto him and close my eyes for a bit longer, sometimes he falls back asleep too).
• By 1130 or so he's wide awake and hungry so we get up and I fix him a big bowl of Gerber's Rice Cereal with Apple (2 servings in his bowl) and the remaining amount of formula in his bottle (a full bottle is 8oz of water with 4 scoops of Enfamil Premium Powdered Formula and the cereal is mixed with about 1.5-2oz of that).
• He eats all his cereal and then we sit down on the couch and watch some Clifford the Big Red Dog while he eats his bottle. Sometimes he falls back asleep right after his bottle, other times he'll stay awake, playing with his toys til about 1/130pm before falling asleep for his 1st nap.
• On days I work I'll wake him up about 3/315pm so I can get ready for work and we can leave around 4pm when I drop him off at my mom's.
• He usually takes his afternoon bottle around 4/430pm.
• Usually he takes another nap in the early evening while the rest of the time he plays.
• Between 7 and 8pm he eats dinner - 1 jar of veggies, 1 jar of fruit, and a 6oz bottle.
• After his dinner he plays some more, sometimes he'll take a short nap, hubby and I usually eat around 9pm (hubby goes into his 3rd shift job around 10pm and if we eat too early he gets hungry again shortly after he gets to work - eating at 9 usually holds him over for the night).
• Jay takes his medicine between 9 and 10pm, as I don't like to give it to him too close to meals in case it upsets his stomach. 
• We play for a bit after daddy leaves and then a little before 11pm we start getting him ready for bed - change his diaper, let him pick out his jammies and put them on, turn on his scent melt plug-in and his nightlight, brush his teeth and we sit down and he eats his "bedtime bottle" (8oz) while watching The Goodnight Show on Sprout. If we're lucky he falls asleep before finishing his bottle or right after, otherwise, we try to keep him calmed down, reading to him if need be before putting him down if he's still awake past 1130pm.