7 Months

Kate turned 7 months old on Monday. These two pictures pretty much summarize what she is up to these days:

Front view.

Back view.

She's pulling herself up, standing, and climbing up on anything she can! Although she is now crawling for real (no more army crawling), she's already over it, and prefers to spend a good portion of her day standing up with the help of this chair:

She's sitting here. but that's only because I posed her for the picture.

This was the moment the standing started on December 29th:

Kate was desperately trying to get over Nici's legs to get to the fireplace.

Nici loves this crazy girl!

Steve and I both agree that this phase is much harder than when Kate was a newborn. She's still in the really good baby category, but she is waking up A LOT overnight, some nights every two hours, and we cannot take our eyes off of her for one second. She's so active and we don't want her to get hurt. We are hoping that her waking up at night is tied to more teething (it's definitely happening) or all of her new motor development and once one or both slow down she'll return to just one wake up per night. Or, maybe her sleep will get better once she figures out that solid food is good and filling! We're still working on it. Right now, about one out of every five eating attempts goes alright (just alright - not good). But, we have "mastered" bananas, avocados, sweet potatoes, carrots, and pears. We are now working on sweet peas.

The day Kate turned 7 months old also marked my return to work. This week I am slowly easing into it, only leaving Kate for 3 or 4 hours to get ready for next week when classes start. As my maternity leave is coming to an end, I am trying to not be sad and instead be grateful that it happened. The 7 months I got to spend entirely focused on Kate were absolutely glorious. I know a lot is going to change with me back at work, but my promise to Kate is to now make the time we do get together even more special.  And, until Monday, I am going to soak up as much of this girl as I can.

At Duke's in Malibu.
January 4, 2015