8 months

I feel like I have a million things to talk about ...  I will try to be brief.  I will forget a lot I am sure of it. 

Jakob

Mr. Jakob is doing great!!  Jakob has totally become Mr. Chill.  I know.  Right?  Jakob loves to just roll around on the floor and play with any toy that he encounters.  You can give the little man a blanket and he will just turn it over in his hands again and again and again.  Jakob just tries to figure everything out.  He is very, very, very close to perfecting the art of crawling.  Jakob can definitely get to any toy by rolling around but he has started to do a half crawl / half drag that makes us think that he is going to take off like a cannon any day now.  Don't worry ... we have put up the baby gates and the electronics have been put away.  We even cleaned out everything from under the couch because it became Jakob's mission to pull everything out from under the couch anyway.  Jakob now makes the sounds Da-Da and Ma-Ma.  Of course he has no idea what those mean but we like to pretend he does.  Jakob still likes to hangout in the exersaucer and the jumperoo.  But not as much these days.  I think they are becoming too confining.  Though I can on occasion still get Jakob to sit and play with toys in his bumbo.  I think he likes playing with the seat belt on the bumbo more than playing with any toys.  Jakob still loves to eat.  Jakob is still sans teeth.  And he is starting to get some crazy hair!  There is not a lot of it but it just goes all over the place.  I have no idea what we are going to do with it as it gets longer. 

Alex

Mr. Alex is a bit more needy than his "older" brother these days.  Alex just loves to sit in your lap and play with a toy.  Though Alex is much "rougher" with the toys.  He's become quite our violent child.  Just kidding.  The toys might disagree though.  He just loves to make a lot of noise.  That includes screaming and banging any toy he can get his hands on.  Alex has just started to roll around on the ground to get to something on the ground.  It was just last week that Alex would roll over to his belly and still scream his head off because he wanted to be on his back.  I really don't think Alex is far from crawling either.  I give him a couple of weeks.  Alex loves to sit.  He would much rather sit and play with a toy then roll around on the ground.  Alex isn't really making any distinct sounds but he does love to mimic us when we make screaming noises.  Alex likes to eat but can become very stubborn when it comes to ANY green vegetable.  I definitely don't think the boy is color blind.  If we put a green vegetable in the room ... he notices!!  Alex now has his two bottom teeth!  He went for so long without any teeth and then I swear overnight these two teeth just appeared out of nowhere.  He got his first tooth on January 1st.   

Both boys are sleeping great in their cribs!  We go upstairs about 6:15pm each night and I give the boys a bath.  I think this really helps them to sleep.  Sometimes I have a hard time keeping one boy awake while I am giving the other boy a bath.  I do a lot of singing in the evenings.  Most nights the boys are sound asleep by 6:45pm.  We still give them a bottle in the middle of the night.  I don't think we are going to stop that until I am done pumping in the middle of the night.  I just don't want to fall asleep after pumping and have them wake me up 30 minutes later.  I would be very unhappy!!  Otherwise the boys are up to 3 solid meals a day.  They eat anything that is pureed and we have also given them graham crackers, yogurt melts, pancakes, puffs, baby mum-mums, steamed carrots, and banana.  They still get about 23oz of breast milk a day and 5oz of formula.  I am still pumping 4x per day but I have noticed a slight decrease in my supply over the last couple of weeks.   I did have a slight stomach virus last week (plus a lot of stress) and it did a number on my supply.  It has slowly been building back up this week.  The boys are still in some 6 month clothes and more and more 9 month clothes.  It just depends on the brand.  Jakob is still shorter than Alex but a bit more stocky so I really think both boys still weigh about the same.  We also just transitioned the boys to a 2 nap a day schedule.  Some days are better than others in the napping department.  We can get them to take 2 1-hour naps on some days and on other days they only want to nap for 20 minutes at a time.  Those are the rough days.    

We are deep in the midst of getting ready to move!!!  Yikes.  We are very excited but we feel like we have a lot of work to do and not a lot of time to do it.  I am thrilled to think that we will be in our new house when the boys celebrate their 1st birthday in May.    

Mary