8 Months

Baby Joe enjoying his first packpack trip
with dad at the Iwo Jima Memorial 

Little Joe turns 8 months old tomorrow and has an exciting few years ahead of him; I recently accepted a position in Belgium and will be taking him and Rachael to Europe with me for what will hopefully turn out to be several years of travel, education, and excitement for him.  Rachael and I have always wanted to raise our children overseas and I'm hoping that we can hold out over there long enough for him to experience school in a foreign language and learn about the different cultures the world has to offer before we make a permanent move back to the US.

On the development side, he's progressing along quite well.  Still in the 25th percentile for height and weight but in the 98th percentile for head circumference, which has me confident he will fill out as he gets older.  He recently had his top two teeth come through and has been eating solid, albeit mushed, food on a regular basis.  So far he seems to really enjoy squash and sweet potatoes, baby green beens, and fruit like watermelon and strawberries.  We haven't really encountered anything that he doesn't tolerate, but these seem to be his favorites.

He also is becoming quite active and has been sleeping less frequently; he typically only gets in one or two small naps during the day now rather than the several hours-long naps we used to get.  When playing he has started to pick up just about anything that he can, usually tries to put it in his mouth to taste it, and inevitably tries to throw it across the room.  He also just in the last few days started to try to pull himself up to a standing position and has been able to sit upright on his own for several minutes at a time with no assistance, although we usually try to position pillows around him so he doesn't fall over suddenly and hit his head.

We flew with him to Arizona earlier in the month for Wesley's wedding and didn't have much of a problem with him - it was a bit difficult to entertain him for 4 hours in a small space but he wasn't terribly fussy and got in a few naps in each direction.  We're hoping we have the same luck for our Belgium flight when we head over and are crossing our fingers that we'll get a good non-stop flight over.  We're planning to do some traveling almost immediately to see how he does with longer and frequent drives and if all goes well we will be traveling often.