Welcome To Month Ten With Your Baby!
Month 10 With Your Baby!
Baby is quite the little individual now with her own personality that does not hesitate to make itself felt every now and then. She is keen on carrying on conversations not just with you but with birds, animals, the lamp post or the puppy next door. Growing increasingly clever and more aware of her surroundings, she can now understand the meaning of 1-3 words, with ‘No’ being one of them that she has learnt from her consistent and inquisitive testing.
Month 10 Of What To Expect From Your Baby
The most significant changes you are seeing at this stage are that baby will start to play games and ‘test’ you. Not in a malicious way, but he’s learning cause and effect plus testing things he can and cant do. For example, throwing objects off his highchair or out of the moving pram become a fun game as he watches you pick them up, and he will take off at lightening speed delighting at how fast he can move.
You can have lot’s of fun with baby at this age, he’ll love playing peak-a-boo with you, and he can wave ‘bye-bye’ to his loved ones or the lady at the checkout.
Until now he was rather good at pulling himself up to a standing position while holding onto support. Now he is also managing to sit himself back down without help from you. He is moving around the house by holding on to things for support. This is the precursor to the walking stage which is just around the corner.
His ability to manoeuvre things using his hands and fingers is very good now and that means he can pick and closely observe things, even a handful of sand at the park, which may make it’s way into his mouth. He may be hanging on to his favorite toy or blanket with one hand while using the other to explore a new one.
At this stage baby is mostly likely still needing two naps per day and this will continue until he’s 12 months old. This is an age where your little one is mastering the art of so many movements and becoming very mobile, all of which can interfere with sleep or the ability for baby to fall asleep easily – the world is just too exciting for sleep!
Keeping a consistent bed time routine and encouraging baby to fall asleep with positive sleep associations (ones that don’t involve you to help them with) becomes ever more important now. The goal is for baby to learn to fall asleep on his own, that way, when he wakes up during the night he can get back to sleep the same way.
“ At 10 months old we dropped middle of the night feeds on the advice of our health nurse. It took a couple of weeks of settling our boy in his cot with patting instead of feeds, but it made a huge difference and he stopped waking up during the night so frequently.” Elora
Month 10 Of What To Expect From Yourself
Moms can place pressure on themselves when it comes to baby sleep. Please always do what feels right for you and your family and don’t feel pressured into starting sleep training if you don’t think it sits well with your gut feel. Similarly, if you know you’re struggling with continued lack of sleep or broken sleep, it’s one of those things that does need to be addressed to see what you can do to improve it. It’s tough, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel!
Try this: Improve his hand-eye coordination by giving him more complex toys to play with and encourage his understanding skills with toys that give different responses when different actions are done- say for example, an activity based toy. Action songs are great entertainment for them and so are stories that you read out with different voices and role playing.
One of the not so pleasant developments at this stage is that baby may start to fear certain things that never bothered him before. You notice baby turns his head away from strangers. Things like loud noises may startle him badly. This is quite natural and all you can do is cuddle them and reassure them that everything is all right.
