Life With Canaan 8 Months In

It’s time for another baby update, this time we are 8 months in! If babies aren’t your thing, then feel free to keep scrolling down until you hit food. Cheers! Let’s do this! 

I feel like a broken record, but how could I possibly have an 8 month old child already?! Blows my mind!

Ok, so where did we leave off? Right, my child gags at food.

Success! One day, just a couple weeks later, something switched and he started to actually chew and swallow food. He still gets a little too greedy sometimes and tries to swallow without chewing and then chokes, but he can spit food out pretty quickly, so that’s good. Canaan is fiercely independent. So he likes to feed himself. He wants to put the spoon in his mouth, he wants to hold it, he wants to pick up the chunks of avocado himself. This said, I need to put decent-sized pieces on his tray because he grabs, squeezes, then tries to mash it into his mouth. It’s hysterical and he does end up with some food in his mouth, so he is pretty darn happy.

Eating was a huge relief for us, He loves savory foods! We have only tried a few fruits, but he mostly makes a face at them which cracks me up, because I know eventually he’ll probably end up being a sugar fiend. But until then, he loves carrots (steamed), sweet potatoes, peas, anything I mix into quinoa porridge…and he hates yogurt.

Ever since I decided he just would never take a bottle and that is ok with us, things have been going so much better. Zero stress over that! He loves his sippy cup of water because he loves being a big boy. And he loves drinking straight from my glass (which I then have to dump out and get a new glass for myself because he fills it with whatever food was in his mouth). I love it and he has the biggest grin on his face when he drinks water, so we are doing great!

This is more of a family thing, but I decided to slowly purge the plastics out of our daily use. We still use some food storage containers that are plastic and some of our water bottles, but replacing as much as I can with glass containers has given me such joy. I’ve never been worried about the leaching of chemicals into our food from plastics, but lately I just love the feel and aesthetic of glass or stainless steel. AND I know that as long as we aren’t buying more plastics, we aren’t contributing to some of the awful environmental affects…Ok, so why am I talking about this here? Because we haven’t been buying him plastic toys.

I’m not a total snob about it. And yes, he owns some plastic toys, but we feel great at the moment not being surrounded by tons of fluorescently colored plastic toys. I love wooden toys, and he has some adorable wooden cars and animals my mom found for him and he even has his own metal pots and pans to bang on. I love our wooden blocks that we have that spell his name and I hope to get him a whole alphabet set soon or for his birthday. He’s at a great age right now where he still only loves a few specific toys, isn’t upset when they’re not in sight, and doesn’t care about having a lot of things to choose from. That being said, I’m sure with birthdays and holidays, we will eventually be outnumbered in our anti-plastics campaign, but at least we aren’t the ones buying them.

see, he has some plastic toys…

Whew that was a rant. TEETH! We have 4 teeth now, and they are sharp as f*%#!!! That’s probably all you need to know to get an epic visual of me nursing and shrieking while he laughs and then tries to bite the next nearest thing to his mouth (my cheek, my collar bone, my arm…). When does this stage end?! Send help.

Nursing! Yes, we are still nursing. No, I won’t stop just because he has teeth. He doesn’t do a bottle, remember? And I won’t starve him out. And honestly I still love nursing. It gives us such special moments together where I can just stare at my baby, love on him and cry about how beautiful he is. I am such a tactile person and he is too, and it is the most apparent when he’s nursing. I’ll be stroking his blonde hair and he’ll be stroking my arm or trying to touch my face or wanting to entwine his fingers with mine. They are the sweetest moments that I just don’t want to ever forget.

He is also SO curious and active. He runs around in his walker, yes, but he also is crawling all over the place and hates to be sitting still. He wants to be moving, standing, wiggling, grabbing everything, standing up in bed, chewing on his crib, pulling cups out of your hand, blowing raspberries on your face…everything at all times. Some days he doesn’t nap just because he doesn’t want to miss out! But luckily he’s still a great sleeper, only waking up once at night every few nights (and sleeping straight through the night every other night).

Ok, I’ll stop now because this is outrageously long, but needless to say, I am feeling just so lucky every damn day. I have the happiest, most charming kid and I love it. I have my hands FULL all darn day.

Ok, products!

Because we haven’t really bought anything new, I don’t have a ton of updates. I couldn’t live without our Nuna Sena mini right now, which is our mini pack n play. I drag it from room to room and it gives him a little place to play. It’s so small that it fits in our bathroom (so I can shower) and through doorways. Love it.

I love every adorable piece of clothing my mom finds at Zara for him. Just dying over them.

We are still wearing Freshly Picked moccasins. I buy them in a size up each time they have a sale just so we won’t be without a pair as his feet grow. I love them and he never fights me when I put them on his feet.

And I really want a Fawn Design bag for a new bag/diaper bag. I’ll be traveling a few times coming up and I love that it’s a backpack and yet SO darn cute.

Other than that, for mommy I have been toting a water bottle of some sort at all times, eating tons of healthy foods and always carrying around snacks like Perfect Bars or Square Bars going to our Stroller bootcamp classes in the mornings or doing Tone It Up videos!