Seven

Seven months is so big!

John is crazy active these days. We call him our Speedy Centipede because it sure does seem like he has a hundred feet under him propelling him along at top speeds.  He doesn't crawl with his belly off the floor, but he's gotten so good and fast at army crawling that he doesn't really need to experiment with other ways to get around. He just started sitting up. He never liked trying before because if he's SITTING he can't be MOVING so no, thank you.  He's still not the stablest, but he's good until he dives onto his head trying to go straight from sitting to flying. He's not really a Sit Still kind of kid!

Well, that is until it's cuddle time. I am so lucky to have a cuddly baby. Every mommy should have one for sure. Lucy NEVER cuddled. Not since she could help it. She wanted to be on her own and Stop touching me, Mom! Even now when I idly touch her hair when we're in line at a store or if I sit too close to her on the couch, she'll move away and ask me to stop touching her. It's hard on a Mama whose love language is physical contact! (Good thing she makes up for it in other ways. Like being awesome putting on dance routines and building stable yet very tall towers!) But John, he's a snuggler. He likes to just root right in here and find a comfy place under my neck and grab on to the shoulders of my shirt for dear life. He's a master of the drooly open mouth kisses and will often accompany them with an "AAAaaaaauuuuh!" So violently he loves.

He knows the sign for "milk" now and uses it to mean "milk", but also "food" and "Mama." You know, because I'm just a cuddly milk bag. Although, I'm pretty sure he made the sign for "food" yesterday when he was whining for more cereal and fruit. He did it twice which makes me think it might have been intentional and not just shoving hand by mouth baby MO.

The kids are sharing a room now, which is working out just ok.  I mean, as long as I don't wait too long to put Lucy down and she's already turned into the overtired Monster Lucy that does whatever she can to wake up her brother. And then wake him up again and again every time he falls back asleep. John goes down around 7 and Lucy goes to bed around 8, and unfortunately John's kind of a light sleeper, so we have to go in there and quiet them down once or twice a night on average. But it's ok for now. And we have a basement bedroom for when it just isn't working at all and Lucy needs somewhere else to be. So, yeah. Ok. Not awesome. But ok.

John's sleeping is a little better these days, but nothing to brag about. Most nights I get 6-7 hours of sleep now, though, which is HUGE. 6 months of sleep deprivation does really funny things to a person. When Lucy's at school he'll sleep for at least 2 hours in the morning. When she's here with us? 40 minutes. It's like he has this internal alarm that wakes him up as soon as she and I are doing something fun together.

The bigger John gets, the more the kids can interact in some sort of meaningful way. Lucy's still the best at making him laugh, and she's getting good at figuring out how to manipulate him to be close to her and watch her play and yet not get her toys. It's a fine line. Now that he's pretty fast getting around, they play chase too, which is hilarious. Lucy will go on her ride-on truck or her balance bike around our circular floor plan and Johnny will just army crawl after her as fast as his little arms will take him. Peals of laughter ensue. Both of them think it's pretty much the funniest thing EVER.  Well, and really, so do I.

Two kids just keeps getting better.