7 Months

We are officially on the backside of Harlan's first year. And what an amazing 7 months it has been!

Harlan now weighs 17 lbs, 10 oz (40th percentile) and is 27.75 inches long (40th percentile).

We celebrated Harlan's first Christmas this month and he was, unsurprisingly, spoiled rotten! We had such an amazing Christmas with him and he loved every minute of the attention he got.

One of the major milestones for Harlan is he started eating solid foods. Per our pediatrician's recommendation, we waited until 6 months before he had anything besides breast milk. So far he has had sweet potatoes, butternut squash, carrots, green beans, spinach and broccoli. He despised spinach but he absolutely loves butternut squash. Whenever he eats that he is so anxious to get it in his mouth he leans forward and grabs for the spoon. He still breast feeds first thing in the morning and when he goes to sleep, takes bottles of breast milk at daycare and eats solids twice a day.

This month Harlan went to 2 Razorback basketball games and 2 high school basketball games to see his cousin Trent and Uncle Randy coach. Just like football games, Harlan loves basketball games. He sits contently in my lap and watches all the action. A couple of times he was scared by the crowd when they yelled but other than that, he did awesome!

For the past month he was practicing his crawling and sitting up. He can finally sit up unassisted but doesn't always stay that way. His crawling at the moment consists of the army arm crawl but he is getting there. He can also hold his own bottle and smiles all the time.

He still sleeps through the night and surprisingly could care less about a pacifier. And we aren't discouraging that. He actually hasn't taken one in about a month. We are hoping he has officially weened himself off of it. If so, we got lucky there!

 

Harlan has also discovered his voice. He loves to squeal at the top of his lungs and laughs hysterically when you mimic him doing it. He loves it. One of my favorite sounds is his giggle. Once place he especially loves to talk is in church. And its usually the middle of the sermon. It embarrasses Ryan and I to death but the congregation seems to be ok with it. One service our pastor was saying the closing prayer and his closing line was "and thank you Lord for baby Harlan for showing us how to worship you" Again I will say, we love our church.

He had a great 6-month check up. He is on schedule in height and weight and has met all the developmental milestones....except one. Apparently he should be able to recognize his name by now and we haven't quite gotten there. Partly our fault because we have so many nicknames for him but we have been diligent about using his real name since then. Hopefully it will start to stick. The doc we saw this time is a buddy of Ryan's from college and we really liked him (obviously). He even gave me his cell phone number in case I had any questions. SCORE! I might have been most excited about that. And I am very proud of myself, I have not used it once yet.

Ryan and I were talking last week and we agreed that we want time to freeze and have Harlan stay this age forever. It is so much fun! He is starting to get a personality now and it not quite mobile so we don't have to worry about him going all over the place. This age has been my favorite so far. But I know that it only gets better from here and I just can't wait to see what comes next.