Don't Believe Everything You Hear On PBS

Here's an excerpt from our lunch conversation today:

Me: "Justin, don't throw food on the floor."

Grant: "I saw a commercial on TV saying that you should let babies test their environment."

Me: "We have to teach Justin not to throw food on the floor."

Grant: "Well, maybe it will teach him not to throw it on the floor if you make him pick it up."

Me (thinking): Well, maybe it will teach you not to give parenting advice to your mother if I make you clean it up!

How Time Flies!

Here we are in May already! There's nothing like having a baby to make you realize just how fast time flies by. Justin will be a year old in less than a month now. Of course this realization is both exciting and heart wrenching at the same time. He is suddenly mobile: experimenting with crawling and pulling up onto his feet. It's a relief in many ways since I have been worried that there was something wrong with him because he wasn't crawling yet. He also got his two bottom front teeth in last Sunday, and he has gone back to being a good sleeper. (Although I'm not sure I should say that here since in my last blog I bragged about how Christian had been accident-free, and the day after that post he started having accidents again! Did I jinx myself or what?)

Speaking of sleepers: Grant and Christian are now non-nap-takers. They quit "cold turkey". This has been a trade off of sorts, but overall, I think it is working out well for everyone. The boys were always good nappers. They would sleep for two or three hours in the afternoon and still sleep all night. But lately, it was becoming increasingly difficult to get them asleep at nap times. And after they slept so much in the afternoon, it was difficult to get them to go to sleep at night. We would put them to bed at 9 o'clock, but they really weren't tired, and often didn't even fall asleep until 10 or 10:30. On days when they missed their naps, we would put them to bed early - at 7:30 or 8 o'clock, and they would fall asleep almost instantly. It was on those days that I realized how great it was to have the boys asleep for the night and not be completely wiped out myself. Since Grant's not going to be able to take a nap once he starts kindergarten in a few months anyway, I decided he might as well go ahead and get used to not having a nap everyday. And since Grant and Christian share a room, it was just logical to keep them on the same schedule.

The trade off is that I no longer get a break or any time to myself all day long...but I do get some special quiet time (and they know it has to be quiet for the daycare children and Justin to sleep) with just Grant and Christian each afternoon. Grant tends to dominate this time period with the things he wants to do. Christian is so much more independent, that I don't feel like he wants to "play" with his Mommy. But this situation has taken me from just being excited about Grant going to kindergarten for his sake, to now being excited about it for me and Christian. I can't yet imagine what Christian and I will do with this time each afternoon, but I am looking forward to finding out...and finding out so much more about Christian. Of course it would be presumptuous of me to think that I might completely figure him out. He is still, and always will be, Christian, our enigma.

~Andi