And Then There Were Four: Ten Months (and a bonus)

I'm cheating this week and replacing/merging the Friday Photo with the monthly update, but I'm going to add a little video at the end to make it worth it (which means the majority of you can probably just skip all this reading stuff and scroll down to the bottom of the post).

Brock turned 10 months old yesterday. I'll just give it a second and let that sink in.............. 10 months! That means he's only two months shy of being a whole year old. If you had told me 9 months ago that he would be 10 months before I knew it, I wouldn't have believed you. In fact, I'm pretty sure lots of people did tell me that ("Oh, time flies. Before you know it, he'll be a year old and it will seem like you just blinked your eyes."), and only now am I realizing that I don't really know where the past 10 months have gone. Anyway, this time between the ninth and tenth months has definitely been my favorite so far. He has become more interactive and social and entertaining than ever before, and his little personality is definitely starting to emerge. Things have leveled off with eating and sleeping and his routines have become more predictable this month too, which I'm a big fan of.

As far as I could tell, when I tried to weigh and measure him, he's about 23 pounds (74th percentile) and about 30 inches (84th percentile), but I have no idea if that's even the slightest bit accurate because he won't stay still for more than a second. Those are my ballpark figures though.

Here are some of Brock's patterns and accomplishments for the time between the 9th and 10th months:

At the beginning of the month (I'm talking like the day after he turned 9 months old) he moved to a 4-hour eating schedule. I had mentioned this in his 9 month post and was curious when it would happen because I had read that most babies start the 4 hour schedule earlier. Then one day he just decided he didn't want to eat sooner than 4 hours.
As I mentioned before, his routine has really started to become predictable this month. Brock is a Babywise baby (which can have its pros and cons, but the pros have significantly outweighed the cons for us) so he has always been fairly structured, eating and sleeping in a regular pattern. But this month he has kind of set a schedule and stuck to it. So now I can know, with about 90% certainty, what our day will look like. He eats at 7:00, 11:00, 3:00, and 7:00 with an occasional 30 minute variation, and he takes two naps, one from 9:00-10:45 and one from 1:00-2:15. (I mainly just wrote all that out for my own future reference).
The amount of time he can tolerate being awake increased this month from about an hour and 20 minutes to an hour and 40 minutes or two hours. Too much longer than that during the day and he's pretty cranky and won't take a very good nap.
At his 9 month checkup, Dr. Smith told us that he wants Brock to be eating everything that we're eating for breakfast, lunch, and dinner by the time he comes back for his 1 year checkup, meaning he wanted us to start weaning him off of babyfood. So that's what we started doing this month, which caused some serious reflection on the food Blaine and I eat. I'm thinking if Dr. Smith knew what kind of stuff we eat (Spam, pizza, tacos, fish sticks, fast food, etc.) he might rethink whether he wants Brock eating everything we're eating. He probably would have rephrased it and said, "I want Brock eating everything that you should be eating."
Brock outgrew all his 6-9 month clothes this month and now wears 9-12 month sizes, which I have found they apparently don't make too many of. I never seem to be able to find this size in the store for some reason. Really he's wearing 12 month pants already because his legs are kind of long, but he still needs 9 month shirts because his arms aren't long enough for 12 months yet.
He started doing a lot of mimicking noises this month and imitating the sounds that Blaine and I make. (In case you missed it, here is a video of him doing it - the one at the bottom)
He started saying "du-du-du" around 39 weeks, whenever I would talk about Piper (dog) or Daddy. We're trying to get him to transfer that to "Da-da" but he doesn't quite recognize it as a name yet.
Speaking of daddy, Brock really developed a strong affection for Blaine this month. He's always known Blaine and recognized him as a person who takes care of him, but he started having an occasional preference for Blaine over the past few weeks. It may have been because Blaine was home for three weeks during Christmas break and got to spend more time with Brock. One morning when Blaine had to go back to work, Brock actually started crying and wouldn't go to anyone else because he only wanted Blaine to hold him. And when I've picked him up from the nursery at church the past couple of weeks, he starts crying for Blaine and wants to go to him instead of me. I guess I'm just chopped liver, but it does make me happy that he loves his daddy so much.
Brock recognizes his name now and responds to it about 90% of the time. He sometimes goes off into "Blaine land" (some far off place where Blaine occasionally visits that is sort of a mixture between a trance, a mental check out, and just a long oblivious stare), and if he's there he doesn't respond to his name, or anything else for that matter.
He dropped his third nap this month, so now he takes two naps that are between 1.25-1.5 hours long. I thought I'd be excited about dropping the third nap because it meant we could have a little more freedom in the afternoon, but now he wants to go to bed at like 6:30 because he wakes up from his second nap around 2:15. So that's a little frustrating because we had just gotten to the point (after the time change) where he could stay awake until 8:00 and now we're reverting again. It's not a big deal, but it just kind of makes our nightly curfew earlier than what I'd like if we're out together.
We had several nights this month where he woke crying around 11:00 or 12:00. It was always about the same time and would take a while for him to get back to sleep. I don't know if it was hunger, teething, or what, but I'm hoping he's over it now.
He is no longer content to be still anymore. He is constantly wiggling and squirming and wanting to move around on the floor or crawl all over you. He's got places to go apparently.
We're still experiencing some of the separation anxiety stuff, but I've been working on it. I read that giving them independent play time every day can help, so he now spends about 20-30 minutes a day in his room in the pack&play with toys and music, and he does really well with it. Hopefully it will help.
Finally, the biggest milestone this month was that he started sitting up by himself and pulling up to standing at 42 weeks (9.5 months). He can only sit himself up very well in his crib, I guess because he has the rails to pull on and doesn't have to use his ab muscles (which are about as toned as mine - meaning not at all), but he's got the standing up thing down now.