8 (and a half) months!

Because of the holidays, I totally slacked on Luke's 8 month update. So now, weeks later, I am finally getting around to it!

Poor little punkin has a chapped face again.

Our little man is getting to be quite the big man. He seems to do new things every day, and Phil and I just look at each other like, "Did you just see that, too?" We can hardly believe it. Most days when Phil gets home from work, I give him the run down of the surprising things that Luke has done that day or the several ways in which he's tried to tear down the house. He is ALL boy and is definitely going to give us a run for our money. Here are some of his latest accomplishments:

~ Perhaps his greatest accomplishment as of late is that he can now pick up Cheerios AND put them in his mouth. For a good while Luke would pick one up, only to throw it on the floor or scrape it back and forth on the tray/counter. This was maybe the greatest mystery ever to exist in the Tatum house. Luke puts EVERYTHING in his mouth. Why in the world would he not even try to put Cheerios in his mouth?? Who knows. Anyway, he is now past that and is a Cheerio champ. Well, kind of. We still have to give him one at a time, or he'll just pick one up and push all the others onto the floor, never putting the one in his hand in his mouth. Strange. But true.

~ We are still working on the sippy cup, but he's getting better at it! Chewing on the bottom of it is still his preference, but he seems to enjoy drinking from it from time to time, too.

~ Luke moved himself to a 4 hour feeding schedule, and I am thrilled. I had been trying to transition him to a 4 hour schedule for a while, but it wasn't really working, so I'd given up. I didn't really mind, but I was wondering when he was going to be ready. He made it known that he was ready by suddenly and repeatedly refusing to nurse before the 4 hour mark. It was so weird, because it was the first time he'd ever not wanted to eat. My first thought was that he was sick, but then I figured it out!



~ Luke finally decided to give up the army crawl for good. He is a real pro now and moves at warp speeds. Interestingly enough, Luke started his wanna-be crawl at 5 months and moved on to his big boy crawling at 7 1/2 months, which is the exactly what/when Phil did!

~ Speaking of Phil, Luke is proving to be more and more like him all the time. It's crazy. Every couple of days Phil and I can be found talking about yet another way in which Luke is so much like his daddy.

~ Luke's favorite thing to do is stand up now. It's hilarious to watch him play because he plays for a while on his tummy, then realizes that he's not standing, so he crawls to the nearest sizable object and pulls himself up. Then he realizes that his toys are back where he was, so he squats down and crawls back...for a few minutes, until he does it all again. Although we've witnessed that he's able to sit himself up from his tummy, he doesn't do it very often and seems to prefer to pull himself up to a standing position in order to then squat down into a sitting position.

~ Luke is finally ticklish. He hasn't been until recently, and it's been no fun. Now he is suddenly ticklish, and it's the cutest thing!



~ We were having a problem with Luke flooding his diapers and waking up during the night. As it was, he was already wearing size 5 overnight diapers (Pampers Extra Protection we love you), and we couldn't (and still can't) find them in size 6. We were getting DESPERATE, and then I remembered a woman in my breast feeding support group who told me about these diaper inserts that she once used for her daughter. I called Babies R' Us and asked, and sure enough, they had them! If you have the same problem, you HAVE to get these!! They act as extra padding to help sop up it all up. They're great. For some reason they call them "diaper doublers" at the store, even though they are not called that anywhere on the package. They are called Diaper Booster Pads by Select Kids on the package. Online they only offer a case of them (180 count), but in the store they seem to only sell smaller packs of them (can't remember the exact count, 30-ish?). They have the same logo on the front, though, but are in a white bag, instead of a green box. Oh, and they're only $3.49!

~ Luke's officially entered the separation anxiety stage. He's always been so good with other people and would let absolutely anyone hold him. Lately, though, he's been much more hesitant to go to just anyone, at least at first. Once he gets warmed up, he'll let pretty much anybody hold him, though, (at least until he wants to get down and play) so that is good. I really don't want him to be clingy! Also, for several days after we got back from vacation, he'd scream and cry for a little bit whenever we'd put him in his bed and leave the room. He had been able to be put in his bed and fall asleep on his own for a long time, so I couldn't believe he was suddenly freaking out EVERY time we put him down. Thankfully, after just letting him cry it out for a few days, he went back to his old self. I do think, though, that it all went back to this new bout of separation anxiety, and he had to just get over it!



~ Like I mentioned before, Luke is ALL boy and is already keeping me busy. Just in the last 2 weeks he has done the following: 1.) He's learned to flush the toilet when he's in his walker. He comes into the bathroom downstairs while I'm straightening my hair and immediately reaches up to the shiny handle on the toilet and pulls it down, flushing it. He'd do it over and over if I let him. 2.) He has learned to force himself over the step that goes down into our living room while he's in his walker. It has a little rim on the edge of it that usually stops the walker. Even if he gets going really fast, it will still stop him. He's figured out, though, that if he walks up to the rim and pushes really, really hard, he can push himself over the edge...of course, then he flips himself over and into the wall! 3.) He watched me open a drawer today and now that's all he wants to do. Open drawers. Any drawer, every drawer. We need to get some drawer locks, ASAP! 4.) He started pulling the dining room chairs down on top of himself and even pulled a rattan arm chair down on top of himself in the living room. 5.) Any time we let him crawl outside of the corral, he activates his Go-Go Gadget Outlet Radar and sprints to touch the nearest electrical outlet. He even did this at Phil's office today. Luckily, at home we have outlet covers everywhere. 6.) Yesterday when I was putting his clothes away in his room, in a matter of seconds he pulled the wire out of his sound machine and started happily chewing on one end while the other was still plugged in! When I saw this, I freaked out and did what any other mother would do. I put it in my mouth to see what it would do/had done to him. Sure enough, it shocked me. It had been shocking him, but he was enjoying it and just happily jabbering away.

I realize I sound like the most negligent mother in the entire world, but I promise that I really do watch him, I swear....but I can't keep my eyeballs on him every single second, and he seems to know just when I am not looking!

... And everyone just keeps telling me, "This is just the beginning..."
Lord help us all.



Seriously. I adore him.