7 months

Jake turned 7 months old... two weeks ago. (I'm clearly a bit behind.) It was a happy month!

Jakey loves his monkey!

Well, happy for the most part. In the midst of his 7-month pictures, Jake decided he wanted my camera and scooted/crawled in circles around the entire bed trying to get it. It was so frustrating for the poor guy! Mommies are so mean when they don't let you eat their expensive cameras, you know. All that smiling and no reward.

I finally gave in and let him chew on the neckstrap for a few minutes, which was apparently satisfactory.

I feel like Jake grew up so much in the past month. On the left is a picture of him at the beginning of 6 months, and on the right is a similar picture of him on his 7-month birthday. I know it's probably just because I'm his mom, but he looks so much older to me.

Jake is acting like a pretty grown-up baby, too. He is constantly up on all fours and can do a 1-2 crawl, but then he decides he wants to get places faster so he usually ends up scooting/army crawling across the room instead. That boy covers a whole lot of ground in no time at all. Hello, baby proofing!

When he's not working on crawling, he likes to be standing. (And "walk" his legs forward.) Nothing new, but very cute nonetheless.

He spent the past month exploring all sorts of new foods. More on his eating habits in another post, but here's a little glimpse at Matt and my new favorite game called "Count the Carrots." Jake always wants our food during dinner, so we give him baby carrots (or apple slices, etc.) to keep him occupied until his dinner of pureed goodness. He loves to suck on them, but those silly things get rather slippery with all that baby drool. And, unfortunately, our high chair was tray-less for an entire month thanks to my continued bad luck with IKEA's stock. (But really, who sells high chairs separately from the trays anyway? And how could you have 100 chairs in stock and be sold out of trays? I'm still baffled, Burbank IKEA.) All this is to say, at the end of dinnertime, our floor is covered in carrots. We count them up at the end just for kicks and giggles, and it usually ends up being somewhere around 17. (I'm happy to report that we have recently acquired a tray and the carrot waste has decreased dramatically.)

We spend our days playing and playing and playing. Jake is such a happy, fun, interactive baby full of so much personality. It's a nonstop party with him around.

Jake enjoys his daily walks very much. And when it got to be a freezing 60-degrees, he still bundled up and braved the weather for a jaunt around the park.

Over the past month, Jakey did a lot of hanging out, too. At the beach, at Disneyland, with his friends, and with his mom and dad.

And sometimes, babies just need a break from all that fun.