The Seventh Month

Benjamin is now seven months old. He is sitting up very well and starting to rock forward from a sitting-up position to try to get up on his hands and knees. Although he still has a ways to go before he is officially crawling (thank goodness!), he is getting more and more mobile. He has figured out that he can get from point A to point B by rolling over several times, and he is also starting to "army crawl" when he is on his tummy.

Ben continues to eat with gusto anything you put in front of him. This month, he also finally started taking a bottle, much to my relief. I have been having supply issues for awhile, which I think is mostly related to how stressful the last few months have been and how difficult it's been to maintain anything resembling a schedule while traveling. Although I'm grateful to have the option of formula feeding, I also recognize that this is the beginning of the end of my nursing days, and that is bittersweet.

During Ben's seventh month, we went to Chicago for our visas, so now he has an Ecuadorian visa in his passport! How many 7-month olds can say that? I do think it's pretty crazy (and a testament to our globally nomadic lifestyle) that he will have lived on 3 continents before his first birthday. At the end of March, I took Ben in for another well-baby check-up, and he now weighs 17 pounds! He got four more shots, plus an oral vaccine, so we are now mostly caught up.

Speaking of vaccinations, I came home from the doctor visit feeling a little frustrated because all my kids have had vaccines in so many different places, due to all our moving around. It is getting harder to keep track of it all, and harder for the nurses and doctors to figure out exactly what it is they need, especially when you factor in that other countries follow different vaccination schedules than we do in the U.S. For example, in Portugal, the BCG vaccine (for tuberculosis) is still standard at birth (it is not in the U.S. and hasn't been for years), and they start vaccinating for meningitis at 3 months (in the U.S., they wait until junior high school). I have at least 2 different vaccine records for each of my children, and Alex also has his "international yellow book" since he had the yellow fever vaccine before we went to Angola in 2008.

I decided that I needed to find a way to keep a record of all their vaccines in one place. A quick Google search turned up this little gem -- a free downloadable blank vaccine record done in Excel. I love that you can not only print copies and fill them in by hand to take with you to doctor visits, but also save it to your computer. I am planning on creating an electronic version for each of the boys so I always have a back-up in case the paper versions ever get lost or destroyed. Eventually, I plan to do one for Rusty and myself also.

Okay, that was a little off-topic. Here's a picture of 7-month old Benjamin. I swear he gets cuter every month!