8 Months Old!

Where has the time gone? My tiny baby girl, who lost so much weight and looked so scrawny for so long, is a chubby, active 8 month old. Her current unofficial stats: 18 lb. 8 oz., which keeps her in about the 60th percentile for weight, and 28 1/2 inches, which is around 95th percentile for height. Her hair, which has always been abundant, has become a source of much hilarity lately. I keep it in pigtails during the day to keep it out of her eyes, but when I take them out at night, she looks just like one of those pencil trolls kids used to have:



Caroline has started talking more and more in the last month. She says "mama" and "dada", and she babbles a lot. She's also starting to recognize and use a couple of signs, including the sign for "milk" which is what we use for nursing. She's still eating solids once a day, and she shows a definite preference for fruit over vegetables. She still doesn't really "get" the sippy cup, and her tongue still tends to thrust out any food that is more solid than the pureed stuff that comes in the jars.

Still no crawling yet. She is getting better at scrunching her knees up underneath herself, but she hasn't gotten the forward momentum thing down yet. If I put her down on the laminate floor in the study, she can kind of slide herself around, though, and she always manages to get herself to any toys that are out of reach, so she's moving -- just not very efficiently yet!



Oh, and she now has THREE teeth! The funny thing is that she got the bottom two just about the time that Anna lost her bottom two. Now, Caroline is getting her top left incisor, and Anna is just about to lose her top left incisor. So we've figured out that as Big Sister is losing them, Little Sister is finding them! Unfortunately, now that she has teeth on the top and bottom, she's figured out how to grind them. Now THAT is a sound that will send shivers down your spine .

I don't have a good picture of Caroline's new teeth yet, but here's one of Anna's first lost one. Now that the second one is gone, she has a big hole in her head!



Speaking of Anna, she made us so proud last Sunday. The children's choir was supposed to sing in church, but Anna was the only kid who showed up. So she sang a solo. She did a beautiful job, and she didn't look nervous at all. When she finished, she just glowed.

Anna has also recently qualified for the gifted and talented program at school. This is a HUGE relief for me because her kindergarten situation this year has been less than fabulous, mostly because there are a lot of discipline problems in her class, and the kids like Anna who don't get in trouble all the time tend to sort of get ignored. They're starting GT instruction this week, and I think they cluster the GT kids in first grade, so hopefully the school situation will look up really soon!

We took the girls to New Mexico and Colorado over spring break, and they got to see snow for the first time. I got a few pictures, and I'll try to post them in the next day or two. In the meantime, here's a picture of my two sweet girls together!



And here's one of Jimmy and Anna goofing off with one of the baby carriers. It's technically a "toddler" carrier, and it's supposed to carry up to 65 pounds. Turns out, they're not exaggerating! Anna weighs about 50 pounds, and Jimmy said it was surprisingly comfortable to wear her. Not that he would want to do it for long, but I guess if you had a monster toddler or something, this would be the backpack for you!

Give me a break!

Most of you know that I am a die-hard baby wearer. I wore Anna in a sling and a Baby Bjorn for most of the first year of her life. With Caroline, I have discovered a whole world of baby carriers, and I've used slings, wraps, Asian-style baby carriers (the current favorite), and several other types of carriers. Both my girls have hated the carseat and/or stroller, but they've loved being up where the action is and close to Mama.

Well.

Consumer Reports just issued an article warning parents against baby slings on their Safety Blog (link here, if you'd like to read the whole article). Why? Because there have apparently been 22 babies injured in baby slings in the last TEN YEARS. Yes, that's 22 babies total, or an average of about 2 a year. Most injuries were related to user error and/or falling while wearing the baby. But Consumer Reports states, "For now, we think there are better ways of transporting infants including strollers, hand-held infant carrier/car seats".

Okay, let's examine this issue. First, Consumer Reports states, "Baby slings may be fashionable among Hollywood stars and other new parents." Never mind that mothers have been carrying their babies in cloth slings for THOUSANDS OF YEARS. So yeah. They're just the latest fashion trend. Second, there were 13,000 children under the age of 3 seen in emergency rooms last year because they fell out of strollers. THIRTEEN THOUSAND. In one year. This is only the kids who fell out of the strollers. That number doesn't even include the number of children who might have been injured when the stroller collapsed or who might have gotten tangled up if they weren't strapped in tightly enough.

So obviously, strollers are not a safer option. But let's examine carseats. Surely they're much safer than slings, since they're designed to keep babies safe in cars, right? Not so much. A quick Google search reveals that Evenflo recalled one of its infant carseats because the handle mechanism could suddenly release, spilling the baby onto the ground. This resulted in 97 injuries over a 10-year period -- far more than the 22 injuries reported from baby slings, and that's just ONE BRAND of carseat. There have also been babies injuried or killed because they were sleeping in the carriers without being strapped in tightly, and they slipped down and suffocated or got tangled in the straps. Oh, and since 85-90% of carseats are installed incorrectly in cars (that number includes the misuse of the harness, which is often left too loose or positioned improperly), the user error rate is obviously pretty high, even when just using them as infant carriers. Parents also tend to prop infant carseats into the child seat part of shopping carts in the grocery store, which can cause the cart to be top heavy and tip over, causing injuries. So adding all of these up results in a much higher number of injures resulting from infant carseat carriers than from baby slings.

Caroline has gotten too big for me to be very comfortable carrying her in a one-shouldered sling these days, so I don't use it very often anymore. Instead, we've gone to a variety of two-shouldered wraps and carriers. But if I have another baby, I will not hesitate to use the sling again. Yes, there's always the slight risk that I could trip and fall while wearing him/her, but that risk would be the same if I were carrying her in my arms (or possibly higher, since I wouldn't have my arms to break the fall), and I don't see anyone advocating that people stop carrying their babies in arms!

This is just one more reason that I have stopped referring to Consumer Reports when I shop. Between this article and their recent infant carseat testing fiasco (they had to rescind all the information they put out because they tested the seats incorrectly), I just can't take them seriously anymore.