This past week our Oliva turned eight months old!

Olivia’s big milestone this month is that she popped her first two teeth. She got her two middle bottom teeth, one right after the other, about halfway through the month. If you Google teething symptoms, Olivia has had all of them. Thankfully, about a week ago, she finally started feeling a lot better. But it’s been a rough month for our little girl. And she’s still chewing on everything, so I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s working on the next tooth already.

Olivia is still huge on tummy time and rolls around everywhere. For not officially crawling, she moves around extremely quickly. Just in the last couple of weeks, she’s started doing the thing where she rocks on all fours. So it feels like she could start crawling any day.

While still not overly motivated to sit up on her own, Olivia does love standing. She’ll hold on to someone’s hands or the edge of her pack ‘n play with this huge smile on her face.

Olivia says “mama” all the time now, very intentionally, usually when she’s upset, tired, hungry, wants something, etc. She does make the “dada” sound but isn’t saying “dada” intentionally yet. It still sounds like she’s saying “hi” sometimes, and at times, very intentionally. Once this month, it really sounded like she said “night night.” Jake was in the room when it happened, and he agreed with me. Olivia definitely understands what “night night” means and will rub her eyes when I say it.

We took our only vacation for 2021 and first family vacation in two years in mid-August to southwest Michigan. Olivia did well. I brought a pack ‘n play, which at this point, is a novelty, so she enjoyed it. The pack ‘n play kept Olivia from crashing into the hard living room furniture and being underfoot all the time. She loved being able to roll around freely in it.

Almost all of my pictures of Olivia from our trip are from the beach.

Our other adventures this month have included a day trip to Chicago (my first in 17 months), two outings to the beach back in Wisconsin, a second excursion to the Bristol Renaissance Faire, and lots of family time, including both sets of grandparents and two of Tommy’s and Olivia’s aunts.

Olivia is starting to come into her own being around more people. We could pass Tommy around pretty much anywhere, and he’d almost always have this huge smile on his face. Olivia has to warm up to people more. Once she’s been hanging out with someone for a while, she usually does okay being handed over for a bit.

Olivia is so long that I’m already pulling out 9-month onesies for the remaining weeks of warm weather. I’m gearing up to do a huge clothing switch as we transition into fall. We’re just finishing up our supply of size 2 diapers, and then she’ll move up to size 3.

Between teething and being sick, it was a stretch to get Olivia to eat more than five ounces at a time this month. I’ve tried to stay steady at size, but I had to drop back to five or even four ounces a lot of this month. Olivia is still eating every three hours or so through the day and most nights, too.

I know that I sound like a broken record talking about Olivia’s sleep. It was another really tough month. There was exactly one night that she slept from midnight to 6:30 a.m. Every other night she’s woken up at least twice, often more. In addition to teething, she was sick with another bug, most likely something that Tommy brought home from school. It all happened at the same time. There were a handful of nights during that stretch that were like the first month all over again, waking up every half hour or hour all night long.

The last few nights of the month I finally got proactive about really getting her to sleep through the night. We had a night where Olivia woke up at something like 11:30, 1:30, and 5:30. She wanted to eat every single time she woke up, and it was just the last straw for me. Making some notable changes to her sleep routine has made a difference. I’ll talk more about this process in the next update.

The only upside to not getting great sleep at night is that Olivia is more motivated than ever to take good naps. When she’s ready to nap and to first go to sleep at night, she passes out pretty much immediately.

You can find all of my Olivia updates as well as my Tommy baby/toddler updates, general family updates, and other family-related posts in the family section of the blog.