Hellobee

Charlie turned 16 months old yesterday! It truly is amazing how much he changes from month to month. Haha I say that every month, and it’s only amazing to me. But this was a HUGE month for little Charlie! He transitioned to one nap, he’s down to three bottles a day (from as many as 6!), he’s become a climbing monster, and he’s had a word explosion… well maybe more of a word firecracker. His baby face has been gone for some time, and he looks even older than he actually is because he has so many teeth and so much Beiber hair. He’s grown a lot taller the past couple of months, and now fits into clothes for 2 year olds. He is definitely a baby no longer.

2 days old

1 month old

 Sleep
Just after Charlie turned 15 months old, we pushed him to one nap a day. He was able to stay awake longer and longer between his naps, which kept pushing his bedtime to 8:00, 8:30, 9:00 even. And I don’t know how parents deal with late bedtimes because by the time Charlie goes down at 7:30pm (his bedtime pretty much since he was born), I’m pooped! I’m extremely obsessive about Charlie’s sleep and didn’t want to push him to one nap until he was ready, but he actually gets more sleep (around 13-14 hours/day) with one long 3 hour nap, than he did with 2, 1 hour naps. As long as he does something active in the mornings, he’s fine staying awake 5, even 6 hours before his afternoon nap. The weekends are tougher to fill up because there is less to do. During the week Charlie has at least 5 playdates, classes, and several indoor playspaces he can visit. On the weekend we can only go out to an early breakfast or to the market in the mornings, but we have to be out and about or Charlie starts getting cranky around the 4 hour mark.

2 months old

Months 13 – 15 were a little bumpy with Charlie’s sleep. Sometimes we had to push him in the stroller to get him to fall asleep. Sometimes he’d wake up in the middle of the night and want a bottle when he’d been sleeping through the night since he was 4 1/2 months old. Maybe his little baby brain was busy trying to figure out out to walk and talk. But now his sleep is back on track. I love just being able to put him in his crib and having him put himself to sleep. Sleep training was worth it fo shizzle.

3 months old

This has been his schedule for the past two weeks:

6:00am – 7:00am – Wake up, 5 oz bottle (wake up time has been a little unpredictable as he gets used to his 1 nap schedule)
8:00am – Solids Breakfast
11:30am – Solids Lunch
12:00pm – 7 oz bottle
12:00 – 3:00pm – Nap
3:30pm – Snack
5:30pm – Solids dinner
7:00pm – Bath, 7 1/2 oz bottle
7:30pm – Asleep

4 months

5 months old. Charlie was born with a lot of hair, but by 3 months it totally fell out. You can see it’s grown back a lot by 5 months.

Eating

Charlie has been eating well these days. But every time he gets sick, his appetite greatly declines and it’s a battle to get it up again. The biggest trick we’ve discovered is that he always eats better when he’s not home. He regularly eats 10oz for lunch and dinner when he’s out and eats in his stroller, or at a playdate’s house. So now I have our nanny feed Charlie dinner when I previously fed him dinner at home. Getting Charlie to eat enough is probably the most stressful part of taking care of him, so my lazy ass passed the buck to our nanny.

With the increase in solids, we also reduced Charlie’s bottles from 5-6 to 3 a day. Now you can’t even say “baba” (babyspeak for milk) around him or he’ll start chanting “babababababababa” nonstop and throw a minifit. The boy LOVES his milk, but we have to reduce the amount he consumes or he won’t eat enough solids.

6 months

7 months old.

I don’t think Charlie will outgrow this picky stage for awhile. He’s just never been that interested in food, and all of his little baby friends eat much better than him. He’d be perfectly happy to subsist almost entirely on milk. Though he can chew just about anything (even beef jerky), he won’t eat well unless the food has a soupy/puree-like texture, so he pretty much eats the same thing everyday. He often chews chunky food for the flavor, then spits it all out (except when it comes to his snacks). He’s a little Korean baby as Korean soups are definitely his favorite food. He won’t even drink any type of juice — it’s only boreecha (barley tea) or plain water for him!

8 months old.

9 months old.

This is what Charlie will eat:

Purees: all Stage 1 Earth’s Best Organic fruit and veggies, chicken and beef flavored Stage 2
Korean Food: Moo gook (beef + radish soup), beef porridge, Miyuk gook (seaweed soup), egg covered hamburger patties, Dried Seaweed
American Food: chicken mcnuggets, french fries, pancakes, bagels, bread, oatmeal, mac n cheese
Healthy Snacks: yogurt, string cheese, peeled grapes, peeled clementines, asian pear, apples, bananas, cucumbers, dried blueberries and apples
Snacks: yogurt melts, goldfish, goldfish pretzels, mum mums, Teddy grahams, Pirate’s Booty, vanilla ice cream

Charlie 10 months

11 months old.

I always wondered how Charlie ate so much less than other babies his age, but seemed to be about the same size. Well I only recently discovered that babies that eat more poop a lot more! Charlie has pretty much pooped once a day in the morning for as long as I can remember. He’s only pooped once ever while we’ve been out. That means I’ve never had to carry an extra outfit, worry about changing a poopy diaper when we’re out and about, or deal with diaper rash. I guess that’s been the upside to his picky ways. Since he’s been eating more lately though, he’ll poop anywhere from 1-3 times a day now. Dealing with smelly diapers are a small sacrifice knowing that he’s finally getting all the calories he should be getting. But sometimes his poops are seriously bigger than mine!

Charlie 12 months

13 months old (w/ sideswept bangs because he’s growing out his bowl cut).

Talking

Charlie can say about 20 words, which isn’t that many more than he could say at 15 months. But instead of the baby babble he used to speak all the time, he almost exclusively repeats the words he can say all day long. That means we hear “hi” and “bye bye” about a hundred times a day.

Words: mama, dada, baba (milk), hi, bye bye, hello (when answering phone), more, ball, bubble, uh oh, door, no, book, baby, car, shoes, please, Barbara (his friend’s nanny)

It’s interesting to see his little brain making language connections with things in real life vs. pictures. When you ask Charlie, “What sound does a doggy make?” He always responds with a woof woof type doggy sound. We were recently at Target and he picked up a box with a Barbie doll that came with a teeny little dog, then proceeded to make his doggy noises, which kinda amazed me. He also saw a picture of a baby on a toy box and pointed and said, “Baby!” It’s still going to be quite some time before we can have an actual conversation, but his brain is working hard!

Charlie 14 months (posing in costume at the Brooklyn Flea)

15 months old.

Charlie and I attended a birthday party this weekend, and I got to chatting about boys vs. girls with some of the parents. While I was all happy when Charlie started walking and being more independent, now he’s in the climbing stage and I can’t take my eyes off him. If I turn my back for a second, he’ll be standing on the dining room table. He uses anything and everything he can as a stepping stool. And he’s figured out how to open all the doors in our apartment. We spend most of our time chasing him around now. Little girls don’t seem to be this mischievous!

At the same time Charlie is so sweet and affectionate, and I think perhaps it’s even more heartwarming because he’s a boy. He says and waves “hi” to just about every single person he passes on the street. He loves to blow kisses with a big fat “mwah!” to men and women alike. He loves to get kisses, be held, give hugs and sit in our laps. And because Mr. Bee has been waking up with him every morning, he is no longer a mama’s boy. He loves us equally which has made things a lot easier for me.

Month 15 was a wonderful, albeit exhausting month. I wonder what month 16 has in store!