Juliet 8-9 months with a guest blog from Juliet herself

Jonathan's work from home orders mean that he has taken over my computer desk (rethinking that buying a desktop vs laptop decision), so I'm two months behind in my Juliet posts! She turned 9 months on April 21 and has been developing at a super warped speed lately. 

9 month photo shoot 

8 month photos

I'll summarize her stats and milestones and then hand the microphone to her for her likes and dislikes. 

We haven't been to the doctor for a well check for obvious reasons so I'm not sure of her height but a quick eyeball with the tape measure put her around 29 inches. We have a baby scale so I'm pretty sure she's right about 21.5 lbs. That puts her proportionally around the 87th percentile. She's solidly in 9-12 month clothes and size 4 diapers. So she's definitely followed her brother's trajectory of 'come out small and then skyrocket up the charts'. 

There is all this nonsense about 'be wary of big weight gains or losses- you want them to stay on their curve.' My children have literally gone from below the 10th percentile to around the 90th by their first birthday. I'd say obesity is clearly not a worry with Forest, but with Juliet... girl is definitely a bit on the husky side. 

I kid, of course! I love her rolls and chipmunk cheeks and you can already tell she's lengthening out as she gets closer to the walking stage. 

Her legs are getting so long!

definitely lengthening out. All her weight is in her cheeks:)

Which brings us to her recent milestones since 7.5 months which is the last time I wrote them down:
- Speed crawling solely on hands and knees
- cruising with similar speed
- Letting go of furniture to stand independently

- Will also stand independently if I plop her down on her feet rather than her bottom and then in a controlled way lean forward to get into crawling position or squat to get in sitting position. She doesn't seem motivated to take any steps yet but I think she's capable!

- Pointing, clapping, waving. She's been waving from a very young age but it's become more controlled and consistent nowadays. 
- Has 4 clearly intentional/enunciated words. Dada for sure. If Jonathan walks in the room she points and says a gleeful 'dad! dad!' several times. She also is saying a very obvious 'bruder'. And also hi and bye-bye. Still no attempt at momma. I'm not salty or anything.

Teeth: Juliet just cut 5 teeth in a matter of 2 weeks or so, bringing her total up to 8. She's still a drool fountain with a terrible teething rash so I'm not sure if that's just residual from the teeth still making their way up or if we have even more on the way. I know Forest had 12 teeth on his first birthday so it's definitely possible.  

Schedule: YOU GUYS. Baby schedules are sent to earth to be the bane of my existence. Juliet is on the one hand is much better than Forest but on the other hand is somewhat worse. So 2 months ago I posted that I was writing the blog post at 6 AM while Juliet had been up since 5. Flashforward 2 months later and SAME-SAME. 

We do all the 'right things' according to sleep experts and nothing helps. She just will only sleep 10-10.5 hours most nights. Forest was an early riser too but more a 10.5-11 hour guy. I feel like I sold my soul a bit because both babies slept through the night super early but then end up just not needing as much sleep as other babies. We were capping her naps to see if it would lead to longer night sleep but it didn't. 

And this is where Juliet is so much better than Forest: naps! Girl is a marathon napper. I can count on one hand the amount of times I had to wake Forest up from a nap because it was too long, where with Juliet this is an everyday occurrence, sometimes twice a day. 

So for now, I'm letting her make up for lost sleep during naps, especially because naps are when I homeschool Forest (AM nap) and when I personally nap (PM nap). And baby girl will pretty contentedly play in bed until I go and get her at 6:30 AM so while Jon is working from home (and therefore not leaving the house at 5 am) I get up and run in the early mornings and just get her out of bed when I get home. 

She's on an every-other-day pattern of sleeping in until 6 am or so (yep, I called that 'sleeping in'), and once a week she'll even sleep until 7 or later. I have no idea what causes her sporadic early or later mornings but I'm not willing to shorten naps more than I already have (have tried only 2.5 or 3 hours during the day- ironically she sleeps best on nights when she slept 3.5+ hours during the day. My kids clearly did not read the same sleep books I did.) So anyhoos- this is her schedule on a perfect day:

6:30- Wake up
7- bottle (5 oz) and breakfast
9- bottle (3 oz)
9:30-11- NAP 1
11:15- bottle (4 oz) and lunch
2- bottle (3 oz)
2:30-4- NAP 2
4- bottle (4 oz)
6- dinner
6:30- bath
6:45- bottle (7 oz)
7- bed
Alright, I'll hand it over to Juliet for the rest of today's post.

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Hiya guys! Finally my mom let's me get a word in. Did y'all know that Forest was doing his own guest blogs starting at 2 months? I'm now the ripe old age of 9.5 months and just now getting my first turn. This second child business is for the birds. My mom says I'm supposed to just give you a little blurb about my current likes and dislikes so here goes:
Likes: 
Touchy feely books. Lift the flaps will do in a pinch. But don't come at me with a boring old regular book. Ain't nobody got time for that. I will rub my hand across the first page and if I don't feel anything interesting I am out of there like a bolt of lightening. 

Luckily my mom puts all my favorites in front. 

Stuffies. Particularly if they are Forest's stuffies.

Forest. Speaking of Forest- have y'all met my brother? He's the dreamiest boy in the whole world. My goal in life is to grab a handful of his fabulous hair and pull it as hard as I can. I would follow him to the ends of the earth, or at least the ends of our house, which is apparently the only place we're allowed to go these days. I don't mind though. Now that Forest can't go to school he's mine, ALL MINE, ALL DAY, EVERYDAY. 

Fruit. Momma calls me a fruit bat (but don't worry- not the kind that spreads coronavirus). I will sample the local fare but as soon as a fruit hits my high chair tray I will abandon all pretense that chicken is palatable. Give me watermelon or give me death. 

Naps: For the love of watermelon, will someone please tell my mom to stop waking me up from naps?????????


Dislikes:
Being confined. This includes but is not limited to: my stroller, carseat, highchair (yes, not even yum-yums make this an ok situation), jumperoo, playpen, baby pool, baby carrier, someone's arms, etc. It's just a no from me, dawg. 

When my mom holds me but also when my mom puts me down. Makes total sense to me so I don't know why it's so confusing for her.  


Alright guys, that's me. See you next month or whenever my mom gets around to giving me the right to free speech again.

 

Pleasantly Surprised by Yangon

So we live in Bangkok but Jonathan *technically* works out of the Yangon, Myanmar office. I remember when he first called to tell me about the job and I honestly had never heard of Myanmar. Thats because in the US its mainly referred to as Burma. That I had heard of. And not in a good way. I won't get into it here but there is a long, complicated, ongoing ethnic and political tension which gets a lot of bad press. There has been marked improvement over the last few years but there is definitely a long way to go before Myanmar joins the developed world. 

So the company usually puts people with Jonathan's job in Thailand vs Myanmar, which unfortunately means he travels constantly, which is really hard in this season of life. For various reasons, I hadn't accompanied him on a trip to Myanmar since moving here last January, but when we were invited to a wedding the first weekend of March we decided to take the whole clan. Our nanny is a citizen of Myanmar (which she exclusively calls 'Burma'- it's SUPER confusing and I never know the PC thing to say) so it was easy enough to bring her along and she got to see her daughter that she hadn't seen in years. 

My first impression of Yangon was that it was much preferable to Bangkok! I don't think its a secret that Bangkok is not my favorite. It's so chaotic and busy and congested and hard to get around. Yangon had a lot better infrastructure and the sidewalks were actually walkable which you're hard pressed to find in Bangkok as well. There were lots of beautiful parks and open spaces which just made everything feel a bit slower and more manageable. We were only there for a quick weekend trip but we hope to go back to explore more. 

Our big outing while there was the Schwetigone Pagoda, a massive golden Buddhist temple in the city, surrounded by city parks. Forest was not too enthused for a cultural outing so we made the rounds and photo ops pretty quickly. 

Speaking of photo ops, everyone asked for a picture with Forest. He was in an ornery mood and said no so instead they asked if I'd take a picture with them. I'm a brunette with a fairly Asian style frame so I was a bit caught off guard by this, but it shows how closed off and off the beaten track Myanmar is. Any westerner is a rare sight, but a blonde headed child is definitely still the cream of the crop (our copper headed baby was at the resort with the nanny...and that's the most expat parentheses note I've ever written). 

After the pagoda we headed to a nearby park for Swan boats. Again, we got lots of attention and requests for photos. 

So. Many. Soi dogs.

We cut it short because we had an afternoon wedding to go to and I forgot my concealer in Bangkok so still had to dash around town trying to find a concealer that matched my skin tone. At the mall we discovered that Myanmar doesn't charge 50% import tax so we loaded up on LEGO sets too which Forest was very happy about! Also, their airport has a LEGO store so no more trekking through Bangkok traffic to get to the one measly LEGO store with astronomical prices. Jon can just pick up sets on his frequent (well normally) trips to Myanmar. Woohoo! 

That night was the wedding, which Jonathan and I were actually honored to be a part of. We got to perform the flower ceremony to kick off the wedding and had traditional garments made for the occasion. 

For sleeping arrangements, we had two very small hotel rooms with 2 full-size beds for the 5 of us. We paid for a rollaway bed for Forest to sleep in the room with us and Juliet slept in her pack n play in the room with Nanu. 

Here's a chance for me to put in a plug for the miraculous Slumberpod. 

pic from Amazon bc I forgot to take one

easily fits in suitcase

If you have an infant/toddler and you travel a fair amount, you need this in your arsenal. It's a tent that goes over the pack n play/portacrib/toddler blow up bed and blocks out light and noise so it's much easier to sleep in the same room as your baby. When Forest was a baby/toddler, I would just camp out in the bathroom until he fell asleep and then sneak into my bed because there was no way he'd fall asleep with me in there and then if he spotted me at 5 am he was up for the day. It was always awful and we avoided standard hotel rooms like the plague. 

This was the porta-crib the hotel provided. Not safe! Luckily we brought our pack n play along as backup!

We've only used the slumberpod on two trips so far (and who knows when we'll get to travel again) but I am sold! Juliet actually slept better in this thing than she normally does, I think because it's so dark and cozy. She's been having early morning waking issues so I'm considering just switching her to the pack n play with this thing over it to see if that helps at all (or at least let's us know if it's a darkness issue). Anyway- it's amazing! One of those products that makes you think- how did we survive the first baby without this thing?