Our baby girl is 11 months! Where does the time go?! I can't believe she's going to be ONE at the end of this month. I am honestly not prepared for this at all! I think what always makes me second guess this is the fact that she's still so small in comparison to my other two (not that they were huge either!). Although when Alessia was first born and for the first four months after that she was always measuring in the 0.4th centile for weight, whereas now she's moved up to the 25th! This is probably due to the amount of solids she eats (way more than the other two ever did!) but she has always been tiny even when she was inside my tummy! So I think this coupled with the fact that she is currently the baby of the family makes me think that she is younger than she actually is. But I love it, I think the more babies you have the slower you want time to go because you realise just how quickly they grow up!
Routine: At the moment Alessia's routine looks like this:
7am - Wake up & breastfeed
8am - Breakfast
9:40am - Nap
10am - Wake up
11:30/11:45am - Lunch
12:30pm - Nap
2:30pm - Snack
5pm - Dinner
6pm - Bathtime
6:30pm - Breastfeed & bed
Sleeping: Alessia sleeps for about 15-20 mins in the morning...she had been sleeping for half an hour up until recently when I noticed she wasn't going down for her lunchtime nap as well anymore so I've started to cut down. She then sleeps for about 2 hours in the afternoon and is normally fast asleep by 7pm until 7am. She is currently sleeping through the night the vast majority of the time, although we do have the odd waking when she's teething or if she wakes up for some reason but thankfully it is very rare!
Eating: Alessia still loves her food but has calmed down a bit on the portion size of her breakfast (remember how she used to eat a whole small child's portion of Ready Brek?!). She loves porridge, Weetabix or eggs & toast in the morning, she normally has some sort of leftovers from dinner for lunch followed by fruit and has a small snack in the afternoon. Her absolute favourite snack food is those carrot cake bars by Organix. For dinner she has whatever we are eating, just mashed up a little bit more and to drink she only has water other than when she breastfeeds. She has got much better at drinking water ever since we switched to the Munchkin 360 cup! This was a real life-saver because before that she refused to take a sippy cup or beaker. After dinner she usually gets something sweet like fruit & a baby biscuit (or two...she loves these especially the Ella's Kitchen vanilla & banana ones!). Fortunately she is not a picky eater at all at the moment but I do struggle to get her to feed herself certain things like fruit and raw veggies. She will feed herself dry foods but she's not a big fan of getting her hands wet or messy so she does prefer to be spoonfed! She is basically the complete opposite to how Emilia was as a baby!
Milestones
- Alessia has seven teeth and it looks like she's teething again. I think she might be getting another one but I'm not sure.
- She finally said "mama" at 10 months! She said "dada" first, I think this was around 9 months and that slowly led to "baba", "wawa" and finally after lots of prompting and coaxing "mama". I love it! Especially now as she recognises that this means me whereas "dada" means her dad. She can also say brother which sounds like "bruvva" and has said "uh-oh" though I've never been able to catch it on camera! She attempts to say bye-bye, night night and make animal sounds but they all sort of sound like the same thing at the moment!
- She bum shuffles, backwards crawls and has taken one or two forward crawls before getting fed up, hahaha! She definitely still loves to be held & on my hip all the time and I'm totally fine with that as I want to prolong the baby stage for as long as possible!
- She's pulled herself up to sitting from lying down on her tummy, which is proving quite difficult at bedtime as she is a tummy sleeper so she has started to sit up in bed and play with her toys which is a bit...distracting.
- This isn't a milestone really but I've noticed her doing something for comfort when she goes to sleep which I think is SO sweet! She has a little mouse musical toy which attaches to a pink star and hangs off her cot (all three of my kids had one with a different animal on). When I put her down I always pull the mouse so that the music plays and I've recently realised that she has been pulling the little mouse close to her face and sucking on its tail! (It's a soft toy by the way.) None of my other children did this but I just think it's the cutest thing ever!