9 months!

9 months! Our little guy has now been on the outside for as long as he was "on the inside". I seriously fall more and more in love with him everyday. I love all my children equally and differently, if that makes sense. They all have little things that make may heart swoon, and they also all have little things that drive me up the wall! But there is something about this third baby… he just has me wrapped around his finger. Maybe it's the thought that he might be my last, but I find myself really soaking in every moment of his babyhood.

He is still not walking, but he is super close and he really wants to be! He pulls up and cruises on everything and he will let go and hold his balance and you can see him thinking about taking a step! He's also mastered the super fast crawl and if you take your eyes off him for even a second he will be getting into something that he's not suppose to!

He's also recently discovered the stairs. We have a baby gate, but with two other kids and dogs it does happen that it doesn't get latched, and several times I have looked around for R only to discover him halfway up! He seems to be under the impression that we are hiding something from him upstairs and he tried to escape up there to explore any chance he gets!

We are still exclusively breast feeding, although I have notice that my milk has started to regulate itself a little bit.  I was overproducing quite a bit, and was pumping close to 20 additional oz a day, on top of his regular breast feeding. It's always a pain to have to pump, but it was nice because I have a pretty huge freezer stash built up for emergencies. However, in the past week or so I've noticed that I'm not needing to pump as much and that when I do pump I"m only getting about 10 oz a day. At first it really freaked me out that I was losing my milk supply (I even took a pregnancy test… it was negative!) but then I realized that he's 9 months and my body is just regulating! He's nursing about 5 times a day still, but he's very efficient and we can usually nurse both sides in about ten minutes. He has a jar of baby foot at lunch and another one at dinner and we are giving him little pieces of our food at each meal.

Sleep is going OK. We had a bit of a wonder week/growth spurt about a week ago, and that was rough. I felt like we had a newborn again. R was waking up about 4 or 5 times every night and he was not going back down as easily as he normally does. I'm still not ready to move him onto his room, but I have been trying to curb our co-sleeping a little. Normally the first time he wakes up I automatically bring him in, but I've been trying to put him back to sleep in the pack and play and not bring him in until at least 3. It's been hard, but I know we need to start moving in that direction. I do love our co-sleeping though and I know I'm going to miss it when he leaves our room completely. He still nurses about one time during the night, and more this past week with the growth spurt, and he's also been starting to wake up earlier. The other kids usually don't wake up until about 7 or 7:30 so when he's up between 5:30 and 6:30 it's feels pretty early!

He's still loving playing with his bothers and we love watching his relationship with them grow! He's pretty attached to all of us, but me the most these days. He will cry if I walk out of the room and he hates it if we have to put him in his crib, even for a minute. We all adore him and he's probably a little bit spoiled!!!

Happy 9 months R!!!