Miracle of Miracles

Must be something in the corn, but both kids basically slept through the night last night.

Danica went to bed around 8:30 p.m. without much fuss, woke up once around midnight and went right back to sleep when Kindra returned her to her room.

Colin went to sleep for the night around 9:30 p.m. after a small bottle and did not wake up at all during the night.

Both kids slept through to 8:00 a.m. this morning, when Danica woke up and played in her room while Colin had his breakfast.

I love Iowa! (Of course, this is after Danica had a HUGE fit on Monday night going to bed).

Too FAST!

My girl had her first phone conversation with me today. Mom dialed me up on my way home to let The Girl tell me they were cooking together. Danica actually responded to the questions I asked her (a lot of "yeah"), and told me good-bye when we were done speaking. It was really cute and unexpected. Usually, she doesn’t say a thing on the phone.

And as cute as that was, it was WAY cuter when Kindra had Danica “read” tonight when they were getting ready for bed. The Girl loves the book I’ll Teach My Dog a Lot of Words, which she has us read constantly. I’d read the book to her before and had her tell me what was going on in all the pictures, but it was so much sweeter when Kindra read lines and Danica finished them.

*Sigh* She’s becoming a little girl so fast. Where's my baby?

The Young and the Restless

Latest set of stats for The Boy, who had his two-month check-up on Tuesday (well, more like two months and ten days). He weighs in at 12 pounds, 15 ounces and is 23 ¼ inches in height. A little different from his sister, who was 12 pounds, 1 ounce and 23 inches at at five days shy of three months.

We think he’s still a little uncomfortable from the four shots and one oral vaccination he got. He was fussy last night and tonight until we gave him a little Tylenol, at which point he literally passed out. From swallowing the medicine to falling asleep was probably fifteen seconds. Weird.

He’s been a better sleeper over the past three weeks or so, going to bed for the night around 8:00 p.m., waking at 11 or so to just suck down some food, then sleeping until around 5:00 a.m. He’s been a pretty good napper since he was born, and sleeps much better in general than his sister did. He’ll sleep anywhere and anytime, which is different than Danica, who was constantly awake trying to see what’s happening. There have been a couple of times when he’s woken up at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., but it’s been a nice change of pace regardless.

Unfortunately, Danica hasn’t been so obliging. Kindra usually begins to put her to bed around 7:00, but it usually takes at least an hour to get her to fall asleep (nope… she’s not anywhere near going to bed on her own). After that, The Girl generally gets up two or three times a night. The first time is between 9:30 and 11:00, at which point we’ll scoop her up and put her back to bed. She’ll then wander into our room between 12:30 and 2:00, crying until we take her back to bed. Sometimes she’ll sleep on the blanket we keep by her bed, but that seems to be increasingly rare.

Needless to say, sleep has been a rare commodity around our household. We try to take it easy when the kids sleep, but that’s also our time to get things done, so it’s been a difficult balance. Don’t know what we’re going to do in the fall when Kindra has to get up early to get to work and I have to put in time at night…

Poop.

Our latest endeavour is to have Danica housebroken, err… potty trained. ASAP. We actually might have been able to begin the process five or six months ago, because she was fairly in tune with when she had to go, and she used to make faces when she was pooping. We put off potty training her because 1) we thought she was too young, 2) she couldn’t pull her pants down herself, and 3) we thought she might regress when Colin was born.

Unfortunately, that might have been a mistake. Potty Training: Day 1 took place on Thursday, June 26. We were prepped and ready for The Girl to take the next step and dump her diapers. We picked up a potty chair (Safety 1st Potty ‘n’ Step Stool – wait for the forthcoming blog about potty chairs), some Pampers pull-ups, and panties of several different varieties.

Now that I think about it, we went a little overboard with the panties. We’ve probably got about fifteen pairs total in every style, which is probably more underwear than I own. We bought Curious George panties, Elmo panties, pink panties, purple panties, panties with butterflies on them, panties without butterflies on them, and I think we even bought that kind that tennis players wear with the pocket for a tennis ball (just in case).

Did I mention the Training Pants Saga? I’m not super sure it deserves to be capitalized, but it was a pain in the ass. See, as a guy, I know nothing about anything baby or toddler until my wife explains it to me (duh). Of course, I’ve heard of training pants, but just figured they’d stepped aside for pull-up diapers, which, for the most part, they have. Long story short is that I went to Target, Mervyn’s, and Wal-Mart looking for them until I stumbled upon a post on some parenting website about them being available at K-Mart. So I find that there’s still a K-Mart about ten minutes from us and had to go there.

Beyond the supplies, Kindra picked up the book Toilet Training in Less Than a Day, which her friend Martha had said worked for her kids. Newsflash: potty training CAN take just one day… you just have to pick the right one. We’re pretty sure that day was not the right one (I might add that I was a bit skeptical of this book due to the fact that it was original published in the mid-1970’s and had a section about “retarded” children).

Anyway, the idea is that you sit the child on the potty chair, feed her drinks, and keep her there until some pee-pee appears in the potty. From the point of success, you praise them for being dry, not for going to the bathroom. Problem #1 of this method was that we gave her so much to drink, she was constantly urinating. Problem #2 was that while we kept her on the potty for 15-20 minutes at a time, she wouldn’t actually pee while on the chair. Of course, 30 seconds after she got up, she’d pee in her pull-up. Problem #3 is that Kindra tried putting panties on Danica to see if she’d keep those dry. We ended up going through pretty much the entire stack of panties that we’d bought. In less than four hours.

So… we kept trying throughout the weekend, without much success. Danica will tell us she needs to go to the bathroom, but only after actually wetting her diaper. We’re pretty sure Danica understands what she’s supposed to do. After all, she keeps asking us for the chocolate we were rewarding her with, but we figure the real problem is that she just doesn’t mind sitting around in a wet diaper. *Sigh* I guess like pretty much every other milestone so far, she’ll just get around to it when she feels like it.

Hmm… Who knew I would ever wax on about potty training?