Its hard to believe its been a year since youngest son was born. In this short amount of time, he has learned so much and is becoming increasingly independent every day. Corben can pull himself to stand by holding onto something, although his primary method of getting around is crawling. I have seen him stand momentarily, but he hasn't started walking yet. He uses his pincer grasp to examine any tiny thing he might find on the floor while crawling, most often the final aspect of examining is putting the object in his mouth, unless of course he's caught before that happens! He can bang objects together and likes to help "clean up" (putting objects in containers), and has tried to imitate scribbling (but still needs to be closely supervised with writing utensils since they end up in his mouth).
While Corben is babbling, I haven't heard any clear words (except mama when he's crying), but I know that will happen eventually. He has been showing preferences for certain toys and books, his favorite are the board books series "That's not my [puppy, penguin, snowman, etc]."
Corben is mellow and relaxed for the most part. He enjoys spending hours playing by himself and with his siblings. The only struggle we're having is getting him to sleep on his own. He still prefers to nurse to sleep. We have sleep trained him so at least he sleeps in his own crib, but rather than letting him cry to sleep (which often took up to 30 minutes of total crying time), he gets nursed to sleep then placed in his crib. I know, definitely not what Ferber would endorse. He wakes up around 2 hours later and cries briefly and can go back to sleep on his own. He wakes up again another 2 hours later (close to 12:30 AM at this point) and rather than make him cry it out and wake up his siblings (they share a room), I nurse him and sometimes bring him back to his crib, sometimes let him stay in bed for a couple of hours then return him to his crib, depending on how tired I am. He is up again at 2:30, 4:30, 5:30 and around 7 AM. If he gets nursed at 7 he can sleep til 8:30(making a full 12 hours of sleep).
Its pretty exhausting. I just don't like having him cry it out when he could just be comforted. I think eventually he'll stop waking up so often, or maybe in a few weeks I'll try to go back to a firm Ferber method rather than a loosely followed method that allows me to have time in the evening to get things done, but waking up every couple of hours throughout the night.
Despite his crazy sleep patterns, he continues to grow: 50th percentile for weight at 23 lbs and 95th percentile for height at 32 inches long.
