Sleep and Potty Training

Well, after my last post, Tyler has continued to just improve in his sleeping at night. I do still have to get up most nights to give him his paci, but it's dwindled down to just once, maybe twice, and most nights it doesn't happen till around 5 in the morning. He's still getting up anywhere between 6 and 7am so I think he is starting to wake up a little and realizes that he's getting hungry at 5 but not quite enough to want to actually get up and eat yet. I hardly ever have to get up at that time and just stand in his room to keep giving him his paci anymore. Now my biggest issue with him is figuring out his eating schedule each day so he'll be eating his last bottle at 8pm so he'll sleep to the time I want him to. Depending on what time he gets up in the morning, I might have to really fiddle with his feedings so he'll eat at the right time and so that enough time will have passed after his last bottle so that he'll actually take a good amount of his bedtime bottle. He hit a growth spurt a couple of days ago so that has messed with his eating times. Also his naptimes aren't happening at consistent times every day either (because he doesn't always get up at the same time every day) so that also affects the times he eats. *sigh* So needless to say I really look forward to the day when his bottles and naps are coming at pretty much the same times each day. But since he is sleeping through the night, the shifting daytime schedule doesn't really bother me that much. I know that given time it will all even out once he gets used to sleeping all night, especially since I'm putting him to bed at the same time every day. Also, when he starts on babyfood, that will probably help get things on a more regular schedule too. I'm planning to start him on cereal when he turns four months old, so just one more month till I have that to help add some structure. I just can't believe he's going to be three months old next week!!!

The potty training saga continues with Jake. He is still doing really well with the peeing part but the pooping part is still an issue. A couple of weeks or so ago (or it could have been sooner than that, my brain isn't functioning at full capacity these days) I bought him a model-sized car from Wal-Mart. The doors and the hood open and it's about 5 times the size of a matchbox car. I knew he would love it because he has something similar that he played with constantly until one of the wheels fell off. So I got it and showed it to him the next time I tried to get him to go #2 on the toilet and told him he would get the car when he pooped. So for probably a week, every time he would sit on the toilet he would ask to look at the car (still in it's box) and I would let him and then he would sit there and look at it till he got bored and wanted to get down. I talked till I was blue in the face trying to convince him to try to poop because he would get his new car. A tip here for those of you who don't have boys my son's age, apparently there is NO reasoning with a three-year-old boy. I could swear that Riley was fairly easy to explain things to by this age and she could answer simple questions and even tell me how she felt about things. It's impossible to try to explain why pooping on the toilet is an important thing to a child who is twisting their head around, laughing at nothing and trying to take swats at your hair (one of his favorite games is to smooth my hair down and then pull it all forward into my face). Errr. Anyway, one day, apparently on accident some poop slips out with some gas and in an effort to reinforce what I wanted him to do, I gave him the car even though I knew he hadn't really intended to go. Of course because I have either the most stubborn three year old in the world or the most oblivious, it didn't work. He continued not going on the toilet. BUT today we had a breakthrough (or so I thought). Today he finally went on the toilet and he really meant to go that time. So my big hope was that now that he knew it wasn't a big deal, he will now go on the toilet all the time. I don't know why I thought it would be that easy. Before he went to bed, he again informed me that he needed to have his diaper changed. Double errr. So now I don't know what to expect. I'm just glad that he's gone again. That gave me hope again that I wouldn't still be changing poopy pull-ups when my son is in kindergarten.

Riley has continued to fill her summer afternoons spending time with her friends. She is starting to really get tan just from playing outside a few hours most days. I'm kind of surprised because in the past I hardly even worried about putting sunscreen on her (of course I still did, especially when we went swimming) because she hardly ever looked like she had set foot outside even when she would be out there all day long.

On a side note, for those of you moms with new babies or getting ready to have new babies who read my blog (you know, Lydia and Steph), if you end up needing a cure for cradle cap, I have it. Tyler had a fairly mild case of it and at his two month check-up, his doctor told me to do these things: during bathtime, first put oil of some kind on baby's head (she said any kind of oil, including olive oil but I used baby oil...I mean, come on, I'm giving him a bath, not sauteeing him) and let the oil sit for a couple of minutes; next take a toothbrush (preferably one no one is needing to use) and scrub the oil in to baby's scalp; after that I went ahead and rinsed the oil off at least a little bit although I can't remember if she said that was necessary; next put a special anti-dandruff shampoo with the ingredient ketoconazole on to baby's head and let it sit for a couple of minutes (I found the shampoo at Wal-Mart and the name on the bottle is Nizoral); finally rinse carefully since the shampoo isn't tear free. She said to do this no more than twice a week. I actually only did it three times and Tyler's head is completely clear. The doctor did say that the cradle cap will clear up on it's own if I didn't want to do all of that but that this procedure would just speed up the process. And really, what mom can pass up the chance to keep her baby's head from looking scaly. Oh, and as an added benefit, if you love the bald baby look, this procedure also helps achieve that as well. I think it's the toothbrush step. :)

Good News!

So I have some fabulous news....Tyler has slept basically through the night for the past three nights in a row. Maybe more, I've lost track. :) This happened much sooner after stopping the 11pm feeding than I was expecting it to. Now when I say slept through the night I mean he hasn't needed a bottle during the night. That is awesome and I'm thrilled, but I'm still getting up, probably more often than before right now because he needs his paci several times during the night and sometimes he takes awhile to settle back down and go back to a sound sleep once he has woken up enough to realize he needs his paci. He didn't do that too much before because he was only going maybe five hours at the most without waking up to eat and apparently he can stay in a fairly deep sleep for that long and not need anything. Now he'll sleep for more like eight hours before he stirs and needs me to come and get his paci for him. And then as we get closer to morning, he has trouble getting into a deeper sleep so there have been a few mornings that I have gotten up at 5 to give him the paci and then not been able to go back to bed. I don't let him get out of his crib until 6 (unless he is just really crying and I don't want him to wake up anyone else) so on those mornings, I might have to just stand next to his crib and keep putting his paci back in his mouth every few minutes. I know that right now, he's still adjusting to not getting a middle of the night bottle and that's why he is having more restless nights. I remember the same thing happening with Jake when he first dropped that nighttime bottle. It might be like this for several weeks until he is trained enough to know that he's not going to be fed or even picked up till after 6 in the morning. Hopefully it won't take too long but just knowing that he probably isn't going to need to be fed during the night is enough for me right now. I am still taking the makings of a bottle up to his room every night just in case he wakes up and really needs to eat. I know that might happen when he gets around three months old and has a growth spurt. That's only about two or three more week from now depending on when the spurt hits so maybe after we pass that time, I'll stop messing with getting that bottle set up at night. And maybe after that time he'll settle more easily in to sleeping through the night without the paci. Eventually, if I don't see him improving in that area on his own, I'll have to start letting him cry a little more during the night so he can learn to comfort himself back to sleep. I will be glad for him to learn how to grab his own paci and put it back into his own mouth, though (something I will start teaching him as soon as he starts grabbing toys).

My big problem with him right now is the past several nights he has cried during most of his bedtime bottle. It's extremely frustrating and nerve wracking because I really want him to eat well at that feeding since it's his last one for the night and I'm still afraid he is going to want to be fed during the night if he doesn't get enough before bed. I'm starting to wonder, though, if the problem isn't that he just isn't that hungry yet after his last bottle. I think he's getting to the point where eating every three hours is almost too soon. He will always have a time every day where he'll go at least four hours between bottles when he has a long nap so I know he doesn't need it that often. I'm going to try at least spacing those last two bottles out to be at least 3 1/2 hours apart tomorrow and see if that makes him easier. It doesn't help that he is fussier at that time of day anyway because he is getting tired so I've usually spent at least the previous half hour standing or walking with him to keep him awake and quiet.

Doctor's Appointments

Last Friday I took both boys in for check ups, Jake's 3 year (finally a month after his birthday) and Tyler's 2 month. For some reason Jake loves going to the doctor and any time we drive by the building her office is in he asks if he can go. It's not like he gets anything special there, I mean they sometimes offer him a sticker when we check out but sometimes the lady doesn't see him because the window you pay at is high up and they are sitting down at a computer doing the check out process. So it's not the fun prizes he gets that makes him want to go there, maybe he just likes the attention, I don't know. For now, I won't question my good fortune in having a toddler who doesn't scream through a doctor visit. Riley used to cling to me once we arrived in the waiting room and then practically climb up my body when the doctor came in (thankfully she's better about that now) but Jake would probably sit on his doctor's lap for the exam if she asked him to. So that all went really well with him cooperating with all aspects of the exam. He now weighs 29lbs and is 38in. tall. That puts him in I think the 20th percential for his weight and 60th for his height which is an almost complete reversal of the percentages from his last check up. He is losing his major baby/toddler weight, I guess. He no longer has that pudgy look to him that was so cute. :( Oh well, he's cute in the little boy version too. :)

Tyler also was very cooperative for his exam. He cried like he was being tortured when they weighed him but calmed down after that. He now weighs 11lbs and is 22 1/4 in. long. So he gained three pounds and grew almost another inch in the last month. He is starting to really take on that pudgy baby look that Jake has lost now so I'm glad I get to enjoy those cheeks and chubby arms and legs one more time. :) After being weighed and measured, I held him while the doctor did Jake's exam and he was practically asleep by the time it was his turn. He pretty much just laid there while the doctor looked him over so that was a pleasant surprise. Riley decided to obsess over the shots he was going to need and any time the doctor went near Tyler with any instrument she was saying "Oh no, are you giving him his shot now?! I'm covering my ears!" And then she would curl herself into a ball in her chair and stuff her fingers in her ears. That happened probably three times and the doctor kept telling her she didn't give the shots the nurse did and I kept telling her that I would warn her when the time came for the shots. And the when the time came for the shots and the nurse brought everything in she had to look at the syringes in morbid fascination until I finally told her it was time for the shots to be given and she scrambled back into her little ball and fingers-in-ears position. Thankfully I think she will be back in school when Tyler needs to go back for another check up. She won't have to go through all the stress of the ordeal and we won't have to deal with the drama. :) While Tyler did cry when they gave the shots, he stopped almost as soon as I picked him up again so it wasn't like he was screaming his head off over it forever after it was done.

I'm pleased to be able to say that last night Tyler went NINE hours between bottles. Yes, this is wonderful news! Unfortunately for me still, the feeding that was dropped was the 11pm one I had been giving him before I went to bed. He's been showing less and less interest in that feeding the last week or so, so I finally decided to just forget it. That means I still am probably going to have to get up during the night to feed him for at least a few more weeks, but it also means that my evenings are my own again (unless last night was a fluke and he decides he still needs a late evening bottle...I'm trying to keep that possibility in mind so I won't be upset if that happens) and I can go to bed whenever I want again instead of staying up to feed him one more time. And really, if he continues to sleep as long as he did last night, that's giving me a good five consecutive hours or more of sleep depending on what time I go to bed. I haven't slept for more than three or four hours in a row since he was born so I'll take what I can get!

I'm not so pleased to say that Jake still hasn't pooped in the toilet yet. Errr... I haven't fully decided how to go about getting him to do it either. Since he hasn't even gone once on the toilet, I don't feel like him being in trouble for pooping in his pants is the right response, but I also can't seem to catch him when he needs to go badly enough to actually get it out on the toilet. He doesn't see to be afraid, at least not of the toilet itself, so I don't really know what the problem is, but I'm getting more frustrated by the day.

Crazy Week

Well, this has been a pretty insane couple of weeks at our house. Two Thursdays ago, one of Paul's coworkers and his wife and little girl came here from Texas to see her brother graduate from college. While they were in town they came by our house to visit for the afternoon. Their daughter just turned two and is a little cutie. My kids loved playing with her. We had fun time visiting with Peter and Katie too.

After they left, I had to start getting ready for a visit from my in-laws. As you can imagine having your mother-in-law to visit usually inspires a woman to clean as much as she can of her house and when her MIL is going to actually sleep at her house, well, that inspires a whole new level of cleaning. Unfortunately, with a baby in the house, I couldn't do quite as much as I wanted but I did as much as I could and thankfully my MIL isn't a big stickler on cleanliness. They arrived on Thursday and we spent the time they were here until Tuesday visiting and eating out.

The day of the most chaos for us was Saturday. We took the in-laws over to the Children's Museum in Indy. We were there for close to five hours. Turns out, five hours of walking around a museum, even a fun one just for kids, turns those kids into terrors. During the last hour, Jake had a couple of breakdowns, one major, that involved screaming at the top of his lungs. Even Tyler had a hard time. He had to be carried the whole day in our baby carrier because we didn't have room in our car for a stroller and all of us. By supper time when we went to the Cheesecake Factory for supper, he was at his wits end. I had to take him out of the restaurant and walk up and down in front of it to get him to calm down and go to sleep. I was finally able to go back in and eat some of my supper, which was a club sandwich that was messy enough to drop lettuce all over Tyler, who I was still holding so he would stay asleep. I finally gave that up just to keep from turning my son into a salad. I did get to eat some yummy cheesecake though (chocolate raspberry truffle). When we got done I realized that Tyler's diaper had leaked (maybe I should have checked that when he first started crying, huh? Hey, I was tired to, OK?) so I took him to the bathroom there and changed his clothes. This, of course, started the crying again. I managed to calm him down enough for us to get in the car and start for home, but not long in to the trip, he started crying again and this time he didn't stop until I got him home and started feeding him. He is usually a pretty good traveler, at the most if he cries in the car, he stops when we are moving and especially when we get on a stretch of road with no traffic lights or stop signs. But the day had just been too much for him and this time, even being on the interstate didn't settle him down. But once we got home and I got a bottle in him, he calmed down and thankfully slept normally that night. Jake also settled down, especially after a brief nap on the way to eat supper. And he slept really well that night too.

On Sunday, we had another big day because right after church, Riley was baptized! We were so excited about that and so thankful for her salvation too! She was pretty excited about the baptism too, especially since it was done in the lap pool at the recreation center where we rent a room to meet for church. After church we took Paul's parents out for lunch to the Irish restaurant in our mall as our Father's Day present to my FIL. When we got home, Riley decided that she wanted Paul to take the training wheels off her bike and teach her to ride it. Now this isn't the first time she's requested this. Last fall when the weather was still nice, she did the same thing but wasn't overly cooperative with learning once they were off and in the end, she asked Paul to put them back on. This time though, I planned to tell her that we weren't going to put the training wheels back on once they were off. She loves to ride her scooter and watching her do that, I can tell she knows how to balance so I knew that it would just take some practice on the bike to learn to balance on it too. The training wheels had pretty much become a crutch for her and weren't really training her to do anything except pedal and brake. Those are good things too but I felt like she had gotten as much out of the training wheels as she was going to get. So Paul took them off and they went to the jogging trail that runs just behind our house and started working on it. Now I'll be honest and say I expected her to either eventually quit and want the training wheels back on or at least get tired of practicing and want to be done for the day. Imagine my surprise when I go out there later and see Paul jogging along next to her occasionally putting his arm around to balance her one way or the other as she rode her bike by herself! By the end of the day, she was riding up and down the trail completely alone, braking and getting herself going again like she'd been riding bikes all along! Needless to say, we were so proud of her.

After such an eventful weekend, Monday was fairly calm, with a huge tantrum from Jake at Chuck E. Cheese thrown in there to liven things up a little. My in-laws went home this morning. We enjoyed their visit but I am glad to get things back to normal again. I think part of all the crying and fits that went on while they were here (at least on Jake's part) was because Riley slept on the floor in Jake's room, which meant neither one of them slept as well as they normally do. I had to keep Riley up later than normal too in order to wait and make sure Jake was asleep before she went in to bed. If I let them both go to bed at the same time, there was more playing, squealing and jumping on the bed than there was sleeping going on.

So now that their visit is over I'll be working to establish a routine with the kids for the summer now that Riley is done with school. And if Tyler would start sleeping through the night, that wouldn't hurt my feelings one little bit. He's doing well with sleeping. I'm no longer up rocking him for an hour after his late evening or middle of the night bottle, so that's nice. I'm not loving the fact that he seems to want to wake up sometime around 5 in the morning needing his pacifier and sometimes not settling down until I hold him. He usually eats during the night sometime between 3 and 4 so he's not hungry when he wakes up. And he actually is still tired since he'll sleep on me for pretty much as long as I let him if I pick him up at that time. I try to make him stay in his bed until 6 though, even if that means me standing in his room continually giving his pacifier back to him when he knocks it out of his mouth. I've had at least a couple of days in the last week where he's woken up at 5 needing the pacifier and then not settling down until I pick him up and take him downstairs. Which translates into me getting up for the day at 5am. But, I know, I know, this too shall pass. Probably (hopefully, prayerfully) he'll be sleeping through the night till at least 6 by the time school starts again.