Tara at 8mo

Tara is 8mo already! The time is going so fast. She has been mobile for a few months, first with rolling, then with commando crawling and she now also started 'normal' crawling on her hands and her knees. It does not go fast yet, it looks like she still has to think about which arm or leg goes next :-)

She is pulling up to stand the whole time and cruising along the furniture a little bit. We now need to be extra careful with all the small Lego etc from the boys!

She is eating a lot of solids now, she is very very enthousiastic about it! She likes most things, but her favorite is butternut squash. Today we tried some broccoli as finger food and she was pretty wild about that too. The only drawback of the solids is that her pooping pattern changed from once a week (on only breast milk) to at least 4 times and often more per day :-( Oh well.

I am afraid that she is not a great sleeper. She only goes to sleep when she is really very tired and not before that. And even then she is still fighting sleep. She still is not sleeping through the night, but that is not really a problem. We have a family bed, so she just nurses and goes back to sleep and I don't really wake up for it. Things were much worse a few weeks ago, when the whole family came down with the flu. She was not feeling very well and woke up so many times every night, I think she never slept more than half an hour in a row! That was really hard, especially since I myself was also sick. Compared to that, waking up only 2 or 3 times is a breeze :-)

Now the flu is over, she is a happy baby again and she plays on the floor for long times, exploring everything and just laughing a lot. She crawls to the kitchen and eats the cheerios from the floor (which were thrown on it by herself :-)

The big adjustment for us as parents is that we have another one on the way and I am having a hard time with seeing her as a big sister, while she is still so small herself. The next one will be born when Tara is 13mo. It will be interesting to see how it will be with them so close together. Cees and Tim were 21 months apart and that was pretty hard, but I expect that it will be easier this time, since we are going from 3 to 4 kids (which is only a 33 % increase) instead of doubling the number of our kids (which happened at the 1 to 2 transition).