Closer to His First Birthday Than His Actual Birth Day

Yikes!  Another month older and another month closer to being an entire year old!  At 7 months old Copeland has reached the stage where he changes and learns something new each and every day.  Here are some of his 7 month accomplishments:

• Sitting up!  He still sometimes topples over, especially to the side, but is doing a pretty good job of sitting up and twisting his body to and fro without supporting himself with his hands.  
• Scooting!  He's definitely getting more mobile and can turn circles and scoot short distances.
• Very enthusiastic eater.  He pretty much attacks the spoon and smacks his lips loudly.  He's kind of a slow eater and seems to savor whatever he has in his mouth.  He also gets food pretty much everywhere...hair, eyebrows, ear, etc.  He has tried so many fruits and veggies now and has liked everything.  He even decided he liked sweet potatoes after he tried them a second time.  He eats solids two times a day in addition to drinking milk about 6 times a day.
• For a short period he thought it was super funny to make fake coughing sounds.  Being the mature parents we are we immediately began referencing "Zoolander".
• Fast hands!  My goodness he can latch on to things so quickly!  I've almost lost an asparagus spear or two when I thought my plate was out of reach!  
• Outgrowing 6 month old clothes.
• Went through a phase of not sleeping.  We had always been so lucky that Copeland was such a good sleeper but for about 3 weeks he was keeping us up a lot of nights.  I thought perhaps he was teething but he still doesn't have any!  I also thought maybe he was having growing pains because it seemed like I could almost see him grow on a daily basis.
• Favorite toys are noisemakers.  He loves shaking anything that rattles or squeaks - especially his cage ball that has another ball inside of it that has rattles in it.
• Head shaking - Copeland thinks this is the greatest thing ever.  He vigorously shakes his head from side to side.  I get so much enjoyment out of having conversations with him where I ask him a question and he violently shakes his head "no".  
• Johnny Jump Up - Copeland has figured out how to bounce in the Johnny Jump Up that Dion and Amy gave to us.  It's pretty hilarious to hear his little feet tapping on the ground.
• My goodness is this boy vocal.  He has this noise that I'll call his war cry because it kind of sounds like what I would imagine pirates getting ready to take over a ship sound like - "arrrrgggghhhhh".  He also has what Ryan and I like to call the "Lloyd Christmas", a la "Dumb and Dumber".  He will just sit and make this loud, monotonous sound for what seems like an eternity.  Especially when he finds a tag on anything.  We knew he was doing this at home and then have had several reports that he does this at school too.  In fact, one day we got the report that the preschool teacher (two rooms away) came over to the infant room to check that everything was ok because he was yelling so loudly.  Oye.  One super fun thing about him finding his voice is that he started saying bababababa and dadadadada.  Exciting changes!

We love this little guy more than words could ever express and are having the time of our lives.  I never thought I'd be so happy saying things like "Did you poopy?" or "Please don't bite Mommy's arm", but I couldn't ask for anything more.