Letters to Lexi: 7 months old!

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Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!


Dear baby girl,

You are 7 months old. The number blows my mind. I remember reading other people’s blogs and thinking how big their babies were at 7 months. And here you are, exactly 7 months old, and yet you’re still so little and at the same time so grown. You’ve gone such a long way. I could never imagine myself as a mom to a 7 months old and yet in a blink of an eye, you are 7 WHOLE MONTHS OLD!


Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

I am most likely repeating myself saying that this month has been the most amazing one so far. When I day-dreamed about you, when you were in my belly, I couldn’t imagine that we would have times like this where every single day is unbearably precious and unfathomably fun.

There have been so many changes this month that I had to start a list, not to forget a single thing when it was time to write this letter. But the biggest change is that you enjoy life to the extent that I have not seen you do up until now. YOU ARE FUN! It sums up your whole being!  There hasn’t been a day this month that you didn’t wake up and gift me the most amazing day of them all. Each day, every day. I am not saying this to be sappy or poetic. I am not either of those. I am saying that because it is true.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

You day ALWAYS starts the same. At 6 or 7 am you start moving around next to me, looking for my breast. Once you find it, you nurse for a bit until it wakes you up. You open your eyes suddenly- and there, you’re awake! Instantly a slew of babbles and laughs and screeches comes out of your cute little mouth, making it evident for anyone in the room that THE PRINCESS IS AWAKE!

Both mommy and daddy are usually way too tired from a poor night’s sleep to react to it immidiately. You continue playing with your toes and attempt to engage me by grabbing my hair or my earrings. At some point you get me to open my eyes and THERE- you give me the brightest happiest smile of them all! “MORNIN’, MOMMY! IT IS TIME TO HAVE FUN!” – it says!

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

Who can resist that? So we get up, and groggily change you and put some clothes on to go for a walk with you. In the meantime, you’re just a ball of ENERGY! You pump your legs, you smile, you laugh, ready to start the day. You look at me with a sly smile, jumping from joy every time I smile back at you. There’s just no way to resist that kind of positive energy- it wakes us up!

When we’re finally out, around 7-8 am, we take a nice 30-40 minute long walk, during which you relax and enjoy the views. By the end of it, you start to fuss indicating that you’ve had enough and you are getting hot ( which we have since remedied by buying a much better stroller fan).

You get hydrated, and then play a little bit and soon it is time for your first nap.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

Your big achievement this month is growing out of having to be rocked. One day you just up and fell asleep while nursing, lying on the bed, and then you did it again and again. We stopped rocking you completely and now you purposefully turn to me to nurse to sleep for each nap and bedtime. I am absolutely over the moon about this big step you’ve made and I am so happy we’ve had the patience to let you do it on your own.

What’s next, girl?

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

I know what’s next! Next, you decided that you will gift me with normal sized naps for a few days. I am talking- napping for 1.5 hrs, without or, possibly, with one wake up. We are still working these out, but I have never had you just sleep for an hour on your own, so it’s a big deal for me. I have hope that with a few tweaks here and there, you will be napping good 1.5-2 hrs at a time. I can see you stir at the 30 minute mark on the monitor, but 80% of the time you’re able to fall back asleep. Hooray for that! {edit: you went back to 30 minute naps for a few days and then back again to 1.5hrs. }

After you wake up with babbles and big smiles  again, we get to play with your favorite toys. You love talking to them and playing, with me in the vicinity cleaning or doing a few things.  Your favorite toy of the moment is the Fish and Splish by BToys.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

This whole month we’ve had different out of town guests  and you’ve been loving the attention and all the impromptu trips we’ve been taking.

Around this time of the day, we make lunch and something for you. You had started BLW last month and it’s going really well. You’ve been going through the “I’m not interested in eating, I am interested in playing, throwing food, dropping dishes and making a mess of myself” stages in the last two weeks. You have so much fun doing it that we don’t mind the mess and the waste- it’s all a part of learning. Even when I serve you a whole bowl of split pea soup and you promptly pick up the bowl and pour the soup over your head. Yeah…. That has happened! In the last few days, you suddenly started actually eating again. I cannot wait to write a post about your BLW adventure.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

You LOVE drinking out of a cup or a glass! You’re obsessed with it! I’ve decided not to introduce you to a sippy cup, but instead wait till you learn to drink from a cup, since you love doing it so much. You need our help right now not to spill the whole thing on yourself, but you grab it with both your hands like a big girl and let us tilt it a bit.

You JUST figured out why we keep handing you a spoon and how to use it. Sometimes you get confused as to which end to use, but most of the time you actually get the right end with food into your mouth (and squint from the unexpected taste).

You’ve gone to restaurants with us on multiple occasions and each time I’ve ordered you steamed vegetables or  a bowl of soup and you’ve eaten them like a big girl, enjoying the taste of everything that gets served.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

To my surprise and joy, you’ve become that proverbial baby that can be taken ANYWHERE! What a change from just 2 months ago when we couldn’t even take a car ride with you. Now? Phew! You go on boats, long car trips (not without some fussing), to restaurants, late night dinners, stay up happy and engaged till 10pm, beach, stores, you name it! You barely ever have a problem, you never want to sleep and will stay up as long as there is interesting things to look at and do. Again, Disney just can’t come soon enough. Seeing your personality you’re going to enjoy the heck out of it. Like one of my IG peeps said “Looks like you have gotten that baby you can take anywhere that you dreamed about!”. YES!  I know it can change, so for now I am enjoying every moment.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

This month we’ve had the privilege to celebrate both our birthdays with you and you did so great! We had a blast dressing you up, staying at the beachside hotel, going to the ocean the next morning.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

Speaking of ocean, this month signified your official beginning of becoming a water baby. You’ve been Floridified! You’ve had your first ocean swim, and second, and third, and ….. You get the point! You LOVED IT! Squealed from joy, mouth open, drinking salt water, kicking your legs, attempting to swim. Sand? You thought it was the coolest thing ever! Burying your toes into it, grabbing fistfuls and attempting to eat it. No fear of sand here so far.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

Aaaand, get this, YOU FELL ASLEEP AT THE BEACH! And not once, but twice! Whoa! Must be the sound of the waves, but it was so cool to watch you sleeping while we’re out.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

You can splash and jump on command now, you understand what those words are. You love going to the pool. Every time we swim, you get really sneaky. You pretend like you are splashing, but really what you’re doing is trying to grab some water in your palm and carry it straight to your mouth! It’s hilarious! If you’re lucky enough to be put into a floatie, you make no bones about just lowering your mouth and drinking the water pooled on the float.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

We try to read a ton of books to you. Every morning, afternoon and evening, before every nap. Between me and daddy, we probably go through 6 full length books ( Cat in the Hat length) and 6 shorter baby books a day. And you love it. It’s by far your favorite activity to do. No matter what kind of mood you’re in, if we pull out a book, you’re all smiles and attention. You have to have a book or two before naptime, it primes you for sleep. I love watching you react to what we are reading. You are not a passive listener, either. You attentively study every single picture in the book and react to our tone and certain words, smile, wiggle, kick legs, frown. You have favorite books, favorite pages of books, favorite words. You get a kick out of the word “GOO-GOO GOGGLES!” and you laugh each time. I can tell you’re going to have a huge love for reading when you grow up. I just ordered you 15 different Disney books from Amazon and a bunch of Russian books and you just have no idea what you’re in for.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

You also love reading books with activities in them. You turn pages of board books and pull on tabs, touch the fussy parts, tear off heads of the paper puppets that stick out.

The car seat is no longer your enemy. You do pretty well in it, and I am starting to get a feeling that you get excited when we take you to the car, because you know we’re going somewhere. Again and again, every time I think about your car seat relationship, I want to kick myself in the butt for not getting you the one we have now, right away. It could have saved us a lot of stress and tears.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

You’re almost exclusively in cloth diapers. We still use disposables for the night as we try to figure out what works for us, but I can see us switching to cloth for the night within a month. I love seeing your fluffy butt around the house.

You POSE! Oh how you pose! With the right lighting, I can take the most amazing photos of you. You’ve gotten into this cute little habit of twiddling your thumb on your leg whenever you’re feeling shy or contemplative and it looks adorable in photos.

You still play with your gym, but now instead of passively lying under it like you did at three months, you FIGHT with it! It’s hilarious to watch you struggle trying to push the arches above your head.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

You’re the most expressive baby I know (I don’t know that many babies, though)! You go through a million expressions per second and, your arms, oh, your arms fly around like you’re on stage performing Cats. And those little hands… you make cute gestures with them that make me melt. You talk to yourself, me, daddy, your toys- using a trillion of sounds you invented, smacking your lips in a million cute ways. And those faces! Once in a while I’ll catch a face that I just can’t bring myself to delete, so I’ve started a FUNNY FACES folder for you to laugh at when you’re a teenager.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

You know the word Kitty in Russian (KISA), and daddy in Russian (PAPA) and you always look for them if I ask where they are. You understand that very well. Kitties are your favorite things EVER! Like, seriously, you LOVE cats! Oh boy, do they not know what’s coming when you finally start crawling…. Brrrr….! And you think dad is alright too! LOL! No, you really adore him! If you see him somewhere in the distance, you stop doing whatever you are doing and just stare. Or if he’s close enough to see you, you put your hands in your mouth and smile shyly, sometimes hiding behind mommy’s shoulder. And then your eyes meet and it’s a giggle/kick fest.

Like I wrote in the mid-month post, you said your first word: MAMA! I have still not digested what happened, but it’s pretty darn cool. You haven’t said it again since then, so it’s quite possible it was just a sound you were making, but I will know that once you say it for real. For now, THAT seemed pretty real and different from a similar MAMAMAMAMA sound. I also think ( though here I am not sure) that you MIGHT have signed your first sign. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but you might have signed MILK. I am yet to confirm that, because signs are sometimes very hard to recognize. You keep signing it, but I am not 100% positive that you know what you mean. I think you’re just copying a gesture that you often see me doing.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

Your sound repertoire includes the following: MAMA, DADADADADADA, TATATATATA, TITITITITITITI, PAPAPAPAPAPA, BABABABABA, BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH, WAWAWAWAWA, GOO-GOO, Ge-GE-Ge, AhGOO and a million others I can’t even repeat. But your favorite sound, by far, is BAH-BAH-BAH! You make it by smacking your lips together and I just DIE!

The biggest change in how you play is that I see SO MUCH purpose in it now. Everything you do is done with an idea or goal in mind. You’ve had such a jump in cognitive development this month, it’s crazy!

You play so fabulously on your own! It’s definitely something that happened this month. You talk to your toys, you bang them together, you grab plastic cups and make sounds. If you are holding one toy, you try to hit it on something that will make a sound.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

Your favorite game is when you pull one toy after another out of the bucket, inspect it, and chew on it, and then put it back. You love fishing in the full bucket, making sounds, until you find THE toy you were looking for. And no other toy would do. Other times, you take the bucket and just EMPTY the whole thing on the floor.

You have so much dexterity. You reach, pull, bang, grab, move in any way and direction you want. You get from sitting position into crawling, you flip from sitting up to your tummy and play there for a bit. You pull up on your knees, you try to crawl but you just haven’t figured out how to do it yet. You get to your toys one way or another: shimming down the carpet, reaching while straining, squrming- anything to get to your goal, especially if that goal is kitties. You do this hilarious move when you’re sitting and see kitties and you want to get to them. You basically attempt to move while sitting, shimmying really fast. You do the same thing when you’re on your tummy. So funny!

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

You hold your arms to be picked up, you say NE NE NE NE or AH-YA-YA-YA-YA-YA when you’re upset. You laugh when I laugh. Like literally, we’d be lying on the bed together and you’ll look at me and laugh and I’ll laugh back and you’ll laugh back… And we’ll just lie there laughing at each other for no apparent reason 🙂 I really love when you laugh and smile- your eyes sparkle and you get the most adorable look  on your face. You say “Eh! Eh! Eh!’ at the end of each giggle and I just can’t handle the cuteness.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

You play all kinds of silly games with me. Our favorite is Rumble- Tumble that we play after each nap.

When your daddy holds you, you sometimes twist and turn until you find me. And when I run up to you excitedly and get my face into yours, you grab it with your little hands and then happily “slap” me all over!

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

You’ve dropped your third nap completely, unless your first two sucked, and then you do need a cat nap around 5 pm.

A recent development is you’ve figured out how to take your clothes off. It’s virtually impossible to put anything over your head, because you will fight and fight to take it off! I was dying watching it the first time.

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

You love using your open palm, splashing, banging on the table, aaaand CLAPPING! You now clap! It’s so cute to see! Sometimes you clap on your own when you’re excited, other times you copy us! But you definitely know it’s a happy thing! You smile and laugh when you see us clapping. Just in the last 2 days, you’ve been clapping to the songs “If you’re happy and you know it” and “Ladushki” (russian clapping rhyme) whenever we recite it. You even clapped with grandma over skype when she sang Ladushki to you and completely blew her mind and made her eternally happy (it’s something she did with you when she was here). You clap on your own when you hear Ladushki rhyme too. You are one smart cookie, let me tell you!

Letters To Lexi: 7 Months Old!

Most of your “achievements” are recorded on video and played over and over again by different family member ( aka Grandma from Russia). {Click here to watch}

For readers:

Items seen in this post:

Blue boat with toys: Fish N Splish BToys

Yellow Giraffe: Lamaze

White tank top onesie: Polarn O Pyret 

Hairbows: Hopscotch Boutique

Highchair: Boon Flair

Chemical Free Rashguards: Tuga

Red Romper: Polarn O Pyret

52 COMMENTS

  1. Kids have so many moments and stages they just need to grow out of, and you guys rock for having had all the patience and wisdom to wait 🙂
    I totally loled at the “promptly pick up the bowl and pour the soup over your head” part :)))))
    This post made me laugh, smile and have a warm and happy heart so many times, awwww!
    It’s definitely my favorite so far 🙂

  2. I LOVE the picture of Lexi and Andrew near the middle of the post, the one with them wearing white. That has to be one of the best pictures of your husband yet and Lex looks prettier and prettier every time.

    I cant believe she is using a spoon and eating all of those foods at her age! And it’s nice to hear that her sleep is getting easier. Enjoy 🙂

  3. So ok,you know I’m 16 and I have NO AGE to have a baby. Not now. But you truly gives me baby fever! I mean how could you not?
    I tought it was impossible to her to get more cute/adorable/etc but geez she is getting more and more and more and more (x 100000) adorable every month!
    Now I have a new favorite picture of her,too bad this one does not include the whole family! Is the one she is with your husband and she is like ‘oh mom,I can’t believe it,you’re so funny!’ gosh this picture is WOW!
    I have to tell you if you ever need a babysitter you can contact me,seriously this wouldn’t be a problem at all (and I know I live too far away from you)!
    You also should travel with her for Brazil when she is old enough,since you guys loves beaches and we have the most beautiful beaches in the world!

  4. Have you had lexies eyes checked? She seems to be cross eyed in quite a lot of the photos you post and she is still young enough to have this corrected.

  5. Love your blog, in one of the pictures of lexi at a restaurant, it looks like you have a super duper cute high chair cover. I just started looking for a cute and different one. let me know where its from. I love all your stories you share and your little girl is a doll . thanks for sharing

  6. wow! not only can she do so much more, but I cant believe how different she looks in just a few short months too! longer hair, and looking (at least I think) a lot more like her daddy 🙂 I like the idea of a funny face “file”…one of my fav pics of my daughter is a grumpy moping face she made a couple years ago that is just precious! I am happy to hear all of your hard work is paying off (not that it wasnt anyways, since it was keeping lexi happy anyways) but, its still great to hear that you guys are getting a little better sleep and quiet time, it is well earned! kudos to you all!

  7. Hey, just wondering if you’re still doing all organic clothing? I know you were planning on waiting until 6 months to wear non-organic clothes.

  8. Could Lexi BE any cuter (said with a Chandler Bing voice) Omigosh, I have never commented on any of your posts before, but she is just too adorable! I don’t know why you get all the crappy comments you get sometimes, but I hope this nice one makes up for them.

  9. I am so happy to read about little miss Lexi at seven months! She has grown so much in such a short time (sometimes I can’t believe how fast the times flies!!), and these photos are absolutely adorable! Thanks for sharing, Elena!

      • Please don’t stress about the Russian too much and keep doing what you can. I think any language exposure is valuable even if it’s not perfect or as defined as the OPOL approach you wrote about months ago. Planting the seed has to be better than not doing it at all! Perhaps when she is a bit older you can engage her with something like Little Pim from Pimsleur to enhance her interest and opportunities for exposure, though I admit that I am not sure of the effectiveness of such a program. (Sorry to ramble on about language; it’s an interest of mine.)

        Anyway, Alexis is sooo cute. I think my favorite picture is the one where she is laughing and tilting to the side while your husband holds her. 😀 <–actually looks like Alexis's huge smile!

      • Could you please explain te bilingual difficulties you are having? I speak Spanish as my second language (it was my major in college and I spent a bit of time in Spain), yet I’ve done a horrible job teaching LO! I just don’t think about it and it makes me feel guilty. I feel like I’m robbing him, but I’m also out of practice so it’s hard for me to speak it these days.

        • THIS!
          It’s just soooo hard to make sure I’m always speaking Russian. I like to be spontaneous and full of emotion with Lexi and the first things that come out of my mouth when I’m excited is English. I have to force myself to translate it to Russian but that raw emotion is not there. I’m getting better the more I do it but it’s just so hard and I feel guilty when I end up with more English than I wanted.

          Like I said earlier the biggest challenge for me is books. She just doesn’t love any Russian books and when I try to translate on the go, it just sounds awkward and it’s difficult to do it.

          A lot of it is due to the fact that I’m not exposed to Russian enough so my working vocabulary is pretty limited. I realize I need to read Russian books to increase it but who has time for that.

          I also really really want to do Spanish on the weekends but we keep forgetting and our spanish knowledge is mediocre at best.

          And then there’s this whole issue of what language to speak when Andrew is present, because most of the time I want him to understand what I’m saying to Lexi.

          *sigh*

          But… That being said, the few words and phrases that she already understands are mostly in Russian so I’m doing something right. 🙂

      • We’re doing Russian and English (and baby sign language) with our 10 month old using the one parent one language model. We bought some bilingual books so my husband and I can read the same book in different languages. There are a few cute ones out there (but definitely not enough!). I’d love to read a post about how trying to raise a bilingual baby is going.

          • Have you looked for Disney books translated into Russian? I know that you love Disney, so maybe that’s an option? Whatever you are able to do is awesome. OPOL sounds very challenging to me. We have friends who are teaching their daughter Spanish and French (he is Colombian, she is French.) They are not even speaking English to her, they say two languages is hard enough, and she will get English when she goes to school. That sounds crazy, but we did know a little boy who spoke Punjabi with his family,and Spanish with his nanny, and he picked up English very quickly once he started school.

            She’s looking more and more like her daddy every day and it sounds like she’s right on track for 7 months!

          • YES! That’s exactly what I bought 🙂 But the problem is the illustrations aren’t the same, the translations are “meh” and not all books are available. The choice is poor. My mom checked out a few books stores in Russia and was disappointed as well.

            Re: french/spanish family, that’s actually quite common and is one of the best ways to bring up a baby multilingual. Good for them for doing the right ( but hard) thing.

  10. Such a cutie! She looks a lot like her daddy!

    Did you have a birthday recently? One of the pictures looks like you are about to enjoy delicious tiramisu with a candle in it, so I’m just assuming! If so, hope you had a great day!

  11. What a cutie pie! Just a random note on the sippy cup thing: my little guy was more interested in cups than sippies for awhile and I was tempted to skip the sippy cup all together, but a friend of mine who is a speech pathologist told me that learning to use one (particularly the kind with a straw, the ones that are more nipple-like aren’t as good for this) can actually be important for speech development because it helps strengthen/train the mouth and tongue. Our little guy is now 20 months old and does incredibly well with a cup (we use one probably 75% of the time now), so it didn’t seem like using the sippy set him back on that. Since Lexi already seems like she’ll be such an early talker (yea for saying Mama!), this might not be an issue for her/you, but just wanted to put it out there.

    • Thanks! Good tip! I didn’t know sippy cups come with straws. My main thing against sippy cups is the whole walking around sipping juice out of it which is bad for teeth and 80% of all emergency visits for kids under 3 or 4 are accidents involving walking while using a sippy or a bottle. And then finally I don’t see the need for it, because she hydrated by BM. We’ll see how i feel about it once she’s a toddler, maybe i’ll change m mind.

      I’ll look into the straw ones, thank 🙂

      • You don’t have to put juice in a sippy, but there will be a moment when BM is not enough or opportune (i.e Road Trip) for hydrating and a sippy with water comes handy

      • You’re doing BLW, right? I believe (I’d have to double check with the book, but I am fairly sure I remember it being there) that they advise a sippy with water during meals. She might be too early into it to really need it, but once they start really eating food and their poop starts changing from that awesome newborn poop to real adult-like poop, having them drink a lot of water really helps with the transition! We love the Nuby soft spouts – no injury possibilities. 😉 At 14 months, she’s still never had juice, just water and my milk. (We are still BFing also – the water isn’t in place of that, just in addition to.
        )

  12. drinking out of a cup…..if you have the patience to do this….you pour a little itty bit in the cup and let them drink it and keep doing that over and over and over again until they “get the hang of it” and you can add more. I also didnt use a sippy for my son….one day he just decided that it was cup time and that was that…..they also have cups that arent “sippy” cups but have a lid on them and a lip….so they can drink like a normal cup but the contents dont come crashing out if they turn it upside down. You remove the valve and remove the “no spill” aspect of it (so if they turn it upside down SOME comes out but not the entire contents)…..it works kind of like a travel coffee mug. Either way works to cup train them….it just depends on your patience level. I would also like to say…..what a cutie pie!!!!

  13. She’s SO beautiful. I’m gushing right now. I feel like her aunt or something hahahahahha. I just love those cheeks and her giant blue eyes. She is SO full of life!! What an absolute sweetheart! I love these pictures, she’s insanely adorable! xoxoxox

  14. Seconding the recommendation for a straw cup! We have one that’s Playtex brand, I think, plus a couple of soft-spout sippies. I try to make sure I have it for my son if we’re going to be out and about (our car’s AC doesn’t work) or when we’re at a restaurant. He’s still nursing a lot, so I don’t worry so much about keeping him hydrated, but it’s good to have relatively non-messy water with solids.

    I also see that you’ve gone back to using cloth diapers. If you’re not opposed to China diapers, the Goodnight Heavy Wetters pocket dipes from Kawaii Baby (theluvyourbaby.com) work pretty well overnight. Night-time diapering is a pain, and it seems like I have to troubleshoot every couple of months to get the right combination of inserts + cover.

  15. She is just beautiful! Such a great post! I love these updates- so fun to see how different all babies are and to see the things we have to look forward to in the coming months:) Can’t wait for a post on BLW!

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