My husband asked me earlier if I was keeping up with my blog, to which I replied "No," said with a great deal of attitude. Why did he care? Then he said that it was important because I was chronicling the life of our son (my words, not his). Ok, ok, you're right.... (guilty feeling)

So Cameron will be 7 months old in a matter of hours. I can't believe how much he has changed me. My life truly is no longer my own and I couldn't be happier about it. During the daytime, that is.

Rolling over at 3 days (yes, days) really has set the tone for his development. He was able to go from laying down to sitting up completely independently by the beginning of September (5 months) and he was standing up on furniture before he reached 6 months. He became a proficient crawler while we were visiting family in GA about 2 weeks ago, though he's been "kinda crawling" for a good month. He just didn't really have the motivation until he saw Grandma Dye's dog. "Oh yeah! Doggy! Gotta get the doggy!" We went to Time Out for Women while we were in Atlanta (an enormous church women's retreat) and he enjoyed showing up babies months older than himself with his crawling and bouncing. By the second day he realized that he was fast enough to steal toys from the other babies, and they couldn't even compete! haha! Lil' stinker! Right now he's quite focused on developing the remainder of the skills for walking. He is standing up on furniture, and anything else he can get his hands on. The kicker is that he can stand without the help of furniture, he just hasn't realized it yet because he always has something to grab to as soon as he's up. So I'm predicting first steps within a month and a half and proficient walking by Christmas. My life will either get much easier at that point, or harder. Let's hope that learning to walk relives a lot of frustration therefore making life easier!

In general, Cameron is a very good, very happy baby. His one pitfall is that he does not like to SLEEP! Not during the daytime, and not at night! He fights sleep like a monster. He is so terrified of missing anything. He wakes himself up before he's ready and then spends the next few hours being fussy and then has an even harder time winding down to go to sleep the next time. It's a source of constant frustration and I wish I knew what to do. I've been tempted to try the cry it out method, and I still may turn that way, but that requires full paternal support as well as full dedication on my part and I'm just not convinced that it's the best option. I don't mind letting him cry for 10 minutes or so on the nights (or days) when he's being particularly stubborn, but in general letting him cry for long periods of time just doesn't seem like a great idea. And it doesn't work for particularly stubborn babies- I'm pretty sure Cameron's as stubborn as they come. He screamed all the way from Sandy Springs to Buford in the car last week and did not settle down till we got out of the car walked around, got back in the car, and distracted him with french fries. He fell asleep fry-in-hand. I just don't see the cry it out method doing anything except maybe making me less sensitive to his cries. If it were really hard to keep him asleep at night, I might feel different, but a boob in the mouth does the trick really well. If we had a bigger bed I would just keep him in bed and let him nurse as needed every night and life would be a piece of cake. But, as much as I enjoy snuggling with my baby, I equally enjoy my sleep time that's unencumbered by baby. I feel like I can sleeper deeper and more comfortably with Cameron in his own bed. Basically what it comes down to is that I need my personal sleeping space and so does Cameron, but we also both need the most amount of sleep possible. So we do what it takes to get both.