8 month Old

Daniel turned 8 month old last Sunday. I hadn't got time recording his progress then as we were travelling down south visiting my friend and Daniel's grandparents.

Daniel isn't an early developer, in my opinion. He seems slow on the physical side of development (maybe just me being neurotic). He is still quite struggling on crawling., I put this down to his wide body frame, his muscles strength are not quite up to the capability of dragging his heavy body forward yet. But yesterday when we were in pool, a mum of a 9 month baby girl told me her daughter is not crawling yet either. Daniel seems quite keen on standing up though, each time I pick him up with both my hands holding underneath his arms, he would try standing on his two feet for one or two minutes at a time. When he was in the bath, he always try to pull himself up to reach 2 little plastic ducks I put aside on the edge of the bath tub, I don't know if this count but he can lift his bottom off the ground for quite while, I know this might be due to the buoyancy ... he is definitely rolling over better than he used to do. Nowadays to get himself into naps in bed, He would be rolling over on bed banging his legs for at least 20 minutes before he finally got tired for sleep. At nights, couple of times i found that he rolled on his tummy with grobag on him ( normally he just toss and turn) and woke himself up this way...

Daniel is quite coordinated now, he can hold bottle/beaker to feed himself providing he is in good mood, he even know how to tilt the bottle to get the last drop of milk. When he is in bed, he can pick up the dropped dummy and pop it back on, the funny thing is that he will throw or blow dummy away if the dummy cannot get him into sleep. I sometimes just leave the dummy in his hand and let himself to decide if he need it, he would hold the dummy tight (or play it to start with) and find the right side to put in his mouth when he want to sleep...

Daniel is very good at understand physical humour at this stage. For example, Terry's hiccup would set him off laughing loudly; My sit-up exercises in front of him would make him laugh; certain words, used to be 'lights', ' now 'corn flakes' and 'tap' would make him laugh. Obviously, peek-a-boo would make him laugh loudly as well, every so often I would put a soft toy in font of my face, say 'where is mummy?' then move away the toy suddenly and say 'mummy is here', this trick will set him off laughing loudly. They said nothing sweeter than a baby's laugh, I truely believe it now.. .

Story like Mr Croc would make him laugh, I always tell story of Mr Croc from one of the pop-up book to Daniel while I am cooking and he is sitting there watching me, I would say 'Mr Croc, are you ready or not?', 'no, I'm just putting on my blue jeans.'....'Mr Croc, are you ready or not?' 'No, I'm just putting on my yellow jumper'... 'Mr Croc, are you ready or not?' 'No,I'm just putting on my read coat'... 'Mr croc, are you ready or not?' 'Yes, I'm just coming to get you!!' The last sentence I would raised the pitch of my voice, whcih will make him laugh.

His teeth are not coming through yet.