8 Months Old And...

Still no teeth or crawling. So Riley turned 8 months old on the 15Th (I know, I'm a bit late). We took her to the doctor on Friday because she needed to get her flu booster shot. When we took her in before she had an ear infection so they waited to do the booster until she was healthy. She weighed in at 16 pounds 9 ounces and was 25 inches long. She is growing like a weed! He said that she looked great. He kept asking us if she was saying any words yet. She's not, but now we sure are trying to get her to say "mamamamama" and "dadadadadada." Should she be talking at 8 months old? Or is he just looking for a genius baby? Oh well.

Riley is starting to pick up on lots of things going on around her. For example, out of the blue she started shaking her head from left to right...kind of like "no,no,no,no." The first couple of times we laughed because it really does look funny. But after the 20Th time in one day we started to think "what is this crazy child of ours doing??" Being the over reactive mother that I am I automatically thought "crap, she's autistic." I see the signs of autism all too often in my line of work. Then I thought about it a minute and she obviously isn't autistic...she looks at people, likes many toys, focuses on people speaking to her, smiles...Seriously Jenny. I asked Hedy about it on Monday and turns out all the boys will sometimes shake their heads and scream when they are at the table for lunch. Crazy kids. She's just trying to be one of the boys.

We finally lowered Riley's crib a notch and put the bumper back on. She's never slept in her crib with a bumper until now. I wish we would have put it in sooner because she sleep so well with it in there. She's finally sleeping through the night consistently!!! Yay, for sleep. Oddly, I find myself yawning more now that I'm actually getting sleep. Brett is constantly yawning because he's the nervous parent that checks on her 4-5 times a night because he "can't hear her." More power to him; I'll sleep.

Riley will be crawling soon. She is brave enough to move herself from sitting to all fours. She still hasn't quite figured out what to do next. She's really good at pushing herself backward. Soon enough she'll be crawling all over the place and we'll be chasing her! Now we have to get all of the safety stuff set up and Brett has a new deadline to finish some of the projects at home!
We had Riley's last waterbabies class. We decided not to sign her up for the next session. It's almost summertime and we can sing songs to her and sprinkle her with water. She will miss all of the attention that she receives, I'm sure. Seriously, every night that we are there someone is saying "she's really good at that" or "she's always smiling." Now, I know she is a smiler, but seriously how can an 8 month old be "good" at swimming. She just loves it really.

Now that the weather is getting nicer we have so many upcoming activities:

• Softball on Fridays (this I am indifferent about - every Friday is a bit much and most of the games are after Riley's bedtime)
• The Circus
• Walks
• A night out for Mom and Dad with friends (Sadly, we are celebrating our friends Mike and Amy's last week in DM - they leave to travel the county as Mike does his rotations for med school - we will miss them!)
• Our 2 year anniversary

Now, here are a couple extra pictures to enjoy!

"Whoa! So that's what a fan does!":

Helping Mom with laundry: