Naps: Henry takes two naps per day. Each nap is an hour long with the first starting around 10:30am and the second around 3:30pm.

Feeding: Henry is still breastfed throughout the day and gets a bottle of breast milk before bed. With his awake time lengthening, his feeding times have shifted. There’s a really awkward feeding around 4:45pm that I’m hoping to consolidate soon with his feeding around lunch. Henry’s feeding times have been progressively getting shorter and shorter over the past few months as well.

Clothing: Mostly 12-month, a few 12-18 month bottoms to accommodate his fluffy bottom.

Bedtime: Our goal is to have Henry in bed by 7:45pm each night but more often than not Henry isn’t going to bed until after 8:00pm. It’s really difficult to get into “bedtime mode” with the long summer days. Also, Henry often doesn’t wake up from his afternoon nap until 4:30pm so he usually isn’t tired until later.

Eating: Henry likes to eat, and wants to at least try everything that we are having. There have been a few times where he’s been surprised by the flavor or level of spice of the food that he insisted on trying, but I’m glad he has an open mind to trying new things still.

He currently is very interested in feeding himself. There have been several days lately where he refuses to be fed by spoon. I’ve tricked him into eating his breakfast by tossing a few puffs into his oatmeal so that he can pick it up rather than rely on me to feed it to him.

We’ve noticed that Henry has an immune response to berries with the tiny “hairs” on them. Henry gets redness around his mouth and a few bumps on his cheeks. It is especially pronounced with strawberries, but also occurs with raspberries and blackberries. It’s quick to show up and relatively quick to disappear, especially with the help of some hydrocortisone cream.

Sleeping: The first half of this month was spent battling some early waking with Henry. Most mornings he was waking up a full hour to hour-and-a-half early. He would push himself up to sitting, acting like he was ready to be awake, but then would start crying or rubbing his eyes to show that he was still tired. There were a lot mornings that he ended up sleeping with us because that was the only thing that worked to calm him down enough to go back to sleep.

Henry also struggled with falling asleep at night at the beginning of this month. He was still learning how to sit up on his own, and liked to make bedtime his practice time for this. After we left the room, Henry would roll around and then push himself up into sitting and get stuck. We had to help him lay back down. Most of the time it took only one of these cycles for Henry to calm down enough to get to sleep, but sometimes this cycle went on for nearly an hour.

We found that if we pushed his bedtime a little later, not only did falling asleep go more smoothly for Henry, but it also helped solve the early waking issue.

Development: Henry is getting much more confident as he is crawling around. When he first started crawling, he crawled with one leg acting as a kickstand to allow him to easily go into sitting. Now he usually crawls on both knees but will occasionally still use his kickstand to get around.

Henry is now also able to pull himself into standing. Right now he mostly does this on things that have a clear handle or ledge for him to grab onto, but he’s slowly working his way towards other things as well. He likes to stand next to something and bang on it, or clear everything off of it.

Henry has been showing an increasing interest in the names of things. He will touch things and say “huh” to get us to say the name of the thing. He’ll also go back and forth between objects to get us to say the names of both things so that he can compare them.

There were two or three times over the course of the past month that Adam and I noted differences in Henry’s language. Henry adds new sounds and phrases very suddenly with changes literally happening overnight. It’s hard to describe his new sounds and language development, but it’s easy to notice if you’re around him a lot.

Henry is now able to climb up the stairs. He figured it out the first time that we let him try. I’m not sure if he would have been able to do it sooner since Henry has a very limited access to stairs; all of our stairwells are outside of our main living space.

We’re just starting to see signs from Henry of wanting to use utensils when he is eating. We will offer him some sticky foods, like oatmeal, that will stay on his spoon as he tries to feed himself. He has a surprising level of accuracy for someone just learning hand-eye coordination.

We’re also just starting to see pointing from Henry. Right now, he points at things that he can touch like pictures in books.

Likes and Dislikes: Henry loves to play ball. We roll the ball back and forth, or bounce it. He really likes it if we are playing with a soft ball that we can toss at him. He giggles like crazy if it bounces off of his belly and back at us.

Diaper changes have become Henry’s (and ours, too) most despised time of the day. He will start whining as we walk towards the changing table. He has little to no patience to be on his back, and will instantly roll over and try to sit up. Even little toys to hold and play with do little to distract him through the diaper change.

Henry seems to really dislike when we wash his blankie. He has a hard time falling asleep when his blankie has just been washed.

Henry enjoys being around other children, and especially enjoys watching them. He likes to see how they play. He often isn’t quite sure how to respond when babies his age try interacting with him. Henry is much more comfortable watching and likes to keep his personal space.

New This Month: We took Henry to his first baseball game where we saw the Twins and Brewers. He had a good time hanging out in the Baby Bjorn, watching all of the action around him, and snacking on the treats we had packed for him.

Henry also had his first visit to the SeaLife aquarium. He enjoyed watching the jellyfish float around, and having sea life all around him in the tubes.

 

Henry got his seventh tooth (bottom left) towards the end of this month, and appears to be getting some swelling from his molars. This tooth seemed to cause him a lot more irritation than all of the teeth he got in February. There was a lot of ear and chin rubbing, and crabbiness in the days leading up to that tooth popping through his gums.

Other Notes: We had a lot days spent out-and-about and on-the-go this month. This month we went to two Maker Faires. We flew to California for the Bay Area Maker Faire. Henry did a really good job on the plane, and dealing with constantly being on-the-go. I was worried about how well he would deal with having to nap on the plane, and in a hotel room that we were sharing with friends. We’ve hardly ever given Henry the opportunity to fall asleep in our arms so I feared we would be dealing with a screaming baby on the plane. We simply put him in his Zipadeezip and gave him his blankie, and he fell asleep easily. At the hotel, we ended up spending a lot of time hanging out in the hallway outside of our room while Henry napped, or when he went to bed before us at night.

Adam and I also helped to plan and coordinate the Minneapolis-St. Paul Mini Maker Faire. Henry spent those two days hanging out with us in his stroller. He even had to nap in his stroller in the midst of all of the action. Again, he did a great job coping with being outside of his normal schedule and routine.

There was a brief phase towards the middle of this month where Henry was trying to suck his thumb.Adam and I did our best to prevent Henry from sucking on his thumb; we seem to have gotten through it as we haven’t seen much lately.

Henry got to spend some quality time with his cousin Elliot this month when they came to visit over Memorial Day weekend. We took the boys to an indoor playground and let them have fun destroying the house together.

Mama and Papa Update: It’s hard to believe that we’re at this point already with our little boy turning one year old! While there were days where time seemed to drag on as we dealt with fitful naps, time really has flown by. It’s amazing to see how much Henry has grown, changed, and learned over the past year. He’s gone from not being able to support his own head to crawling up stairs and pulling himself up into standing; from needing help with latching while feeding to starting to use a spoon; from not understanding he was separate from the rest of the world to doing things in sequence; and from only communicating through crying to using facial expressions, sign language and “words”. Our lives are certainly busier and fuller with this little guy around, but he has added so much joy and happiness to our family that we can’t imagine our lives being without.