Dear Chase,
Here we are at the end of month 10. We’re getting crazy close to a year! Yikes!
Here’s how things went down this month.
Food is pretty much the same. You get 4 bottles a day for a total of 30 oz (usually around 8:30am, 12:30pm, 5:00pm & 8:30pm). Most days you eat lunch with us – pretty much just little chunks of whatever we’re having and many nights you’ll have dinner with us too…but it just depends on the timing. If we’re late getting home from the gym, sometimes you just get a bottle before bed. You’ll eat any food we give you, not picky at all yet and you love Cheerios. You’re getting so good at your pincher grasp.
Speaking of the gym, we officially opened at the beginning of the month. You’re there pretty much every single day. You have your own bucket of gym toys and you do a lot of crawling around. We take turns watching you during most of the class.
We ordered you a Graco Bumper Jumper. It’s meant for a doorway but we’ve figured out how to cheat and attach it to the pull-up rig. You actually seem to like it quite a bit for a little while at least.
There have been huge sleep changes this past month! You’re now officially sleeping in your crib all the time. You dropped one nap so you’re down to two naps a day. After a few weeks of waking up at 6am last month, you’ve shifted to closer to 7am. I put you down for a morning nap around 9:30 and you usually sleep from 10-11/11:30. Your afternoon nap is usually from around 3-4:30. I’ve been trying to get you down for bed by 9 at the latest, closer to 8:30 (about an hour earlier than you were going to bed last month).
This month we’ve also been working on you putting yourself to sleep. We haven’t perfected it yet, but I no longer have to pat your butt continuously until you fall asleep. I take you upstairs, give you your last bottle in the dark, put you in your crib and lay down on the floor in your room. As long as you can see me, you don’t usually cry. Same thing at nap time, minus the bottle. You’ll flop around in your crib for anywhere from 15-45 minutes, but you eventually fall asleep. I’m working on moving closer and closer to the door and occasionally leaving before you’re 100% asleep.
You’re not walking yet but you’re definitely moving around like crazy! We go to the playground most afternoons and you love to crawl around and stand up holding onto things. You’ve learned how to crawl up the stairs and you’ll take a few steps if you’re holding onto mom or dad or your walker. We’re still loving your gated community. It’s big enough for all your toys, gives you room to crawl and we can be in there with you with plenty of room.
Your big accomplishment of the month was to stand unassisted! I wrote it as a goal of yours on the goal board at the gym and you did it the next day!
You’re not a pro at it by any means, but you’re working on it!
You also made huge cognitive strides this month and I had so many proud mom moments! You learned how to stack your rings onto a standing base so I ordered you this Melissa and Doug Rainbow Stacker and you’re such a pro at it!! We also bought you a Giant Knob Farm Puzzle and Shape Sorting Bucket. You haven’t quite figured out the puzzle yet and you prefer to just take the whole lid off the sorting bucket and put the pieces in that way instead, but we’re working on it! It’s so fun to see your little brain working hard to figure things out!
You’re wearing mostly 24 month clothes, but you can fit in some 18-24 month and some 2T!!!!
You had your 9 month doctor’s appointment just after I wrote my letter last month. You’re still in the 90-98th percentile for height and head circumference, but you’re starting to lean out a little bit – probably from all your crawling. You weighed 22 pounds, 6 oz and dropped down to the 75-90th percentile for weight.
You put pretty much anything you can in your mouth, including pebbles at the playground, anything you can find at the gym, dog bones, etc. One of your favorite games is pulling all the shoes off the shoe rack one at time. You also enjoy taking anything you can find out of its’ container and “throwing” a lacrosse ball around the kitchen and crawling after it.
You’re getting a little better with your separation anxiety and there are a few people you’ll let hold you without screaming for mom. You’re very chatty but haven’t really said any new words or sounds the past month.
Overall, you’re a very sweet boy. I love watching you grow and learn and just know the next few months are going to be even more exciting as you learn to walk, talk etc!
Mommy loves you!
If you’re interested in previous letters, you can find them here:
Enjoy!
–Lindsay–
Get my top 3 tips!
Plus quick, healthy recipe ideas right to your inbox every week!
Oh my gosh, I can’t believe Chase is almost 1 year old already!! And hooray for his progress in putting himself to sleep!
He is soo sooo cute! While I am getting sad about Claire growing out of clothes like crazy too (seriously, no child is in 12 month clothes AT 12 months!), I am looking forward to these milestones and seeing how much they understand and grow!
Hi Lindsay, I’m thinking about buying the Graco Bumper Jumper to use on the playground in our building. (None of our doors have a frame, there’s no space for a traditional jumper and we’re always out of our apartment anyway.) Would you mind sharing how you were able to hack the doorway jumper? There’s a monkey bar pole on the playground that I’d like to hang it from.
we just cut off the top and knotted the straps around a giant caribeaner…and then hooked a resistance band to the pullup bar and clipped the caribeaner to that!
Thank you!