I need not tell you I haven't been good about blogging lately...

I want to give you one good last update, but for now, I'll share what I've decided to do.

I'm going to stop posting here. I actually have two blogs: this one, and one for family members. They are very similar, but there are a few things that didn't make it to this one, as there are others that didn't make it to the other one, but were published here (I mean, my family really needs know no details of my lady parts)

But the last few posts have been identical, and it takes a long time to post in one, and repost in the other, and keep track of posting dates, and so on. And to be honest, I can barely find time to write something quickly... sometimes. The fact that I know I have to post and repost has stopped me in the past of blogging at all.

So to make my blogging simpler, I'm keeping the family one only. If you wish to continue reading, leave a comment with your email and I'll send you the link to the other blog. Otherwise, I cannot thank you enough for reading all this time. This blog has been such a great outlet for me, and to have people read it and comment every so often has make this girl feel like a million bucks. You have been a part of my journey through early motherhood, and for that I'll be forever grateful.

I'll post an up-to-date post by the end of the month.

Evan is on a good one-nap schedule, but still needs us in the room to fall asleep, and he still wakes up every night. He was waking up only once, but he started waking up multiple times again. And now Joan is waking up 2-3 times per night.

We are exhausted. I get really feisty and bitter when I don't sleep well, and this is driving me nuts. Last week I actually started sobbing as I was waiting for Evan to go back to sleep one night. I just wanted to go to bed and sleep, but he kept moving, checking on me to make sure I was still there.

He's very clever. The second he realizes you're gone, he throws his binky and elephant out of the crib. Sometimes he even holds them outside the crib before I close the door, as to threaten me, before dropping them the second he realizes I'm not stopping. Guess what he uses to fall asleep? So even if he decided to try to fall asleep, his binky and elephant are on the floor and he can't get them. Which probably means he'd cry longer than he would otherwise.

So we're giving sleep training another try. After a lot of talking, we came up with a strategy that we think will work for Evan: we're going to check on him every 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 minutes, but we're doing it from outside his door. We know ultimately what he wants is for us to get inside his room (that's why he throws the binky out), so we're eliminating that. But we're keeping the checks because I can't do without them. I need to reassure him that we're still there. And we still give him the binky at first, but if he throws it out, he doesn't get it back. We figured either we get rid of it too, because he won't need it anymore, or he learns not to toss it, and we get rid of it later. The binky is the least of our worries right now.

Last night was day one. It took one hour 20 minutes for him to fall asleep at bedtime, and one hour 40 minutes when he woke up at 3:30 am. Considering how it went last time we tried, I was very surprised it took so little. But I know it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Today's nap didn't happen, he didn't settle at all. And right now we're 40 minutes into it and he's still crying. It brakes my heart, but I know he can do it. I know he can fall asleep on his own, he did it before, we just need him to get back in the groove.

But it's still so emotionally draining. I just hope this works...

A few things I forgot to mention.

Evan:

He's on a one nap schedule. He now naps at 12:30 pm, right after lunch, That has gone well.

He no longer eats on his high chair, but rather on the table with us. We got him a booster chair and he loves it.

He rides forward facing now. After 20 months, we decided to change his car seat since he's so tall, and he looked uncomfortable riding rear facing. He's completely astonished with the new view.

He still wakes up every night. So nights only once, others... far too many times. We're going to try a new strategy.

Joan:

She started waking up at night as well. At first I thought it was the 4th month wakeful period, but now I'm thinking it was the cold she still has. She was waking up 3-4 times, but now it's more like two, close to 5 am, when I feed her. she then goes back to sleep for another hour, so not too bad, considering.

She's blowing strawberries. When she's happy, but especially when she's upset, has been crying or is about to cry and you pick her up, she starts going to town with her vrrroom, vrrroom vrrroom, as if she was telling you why she was upset.

And she likes when I hum in her hear. And she laughs when I makes sssshing noises in her hear.

Just a quick note. He weighs 29 lbs 10 oz and is 35 inches tall. That means he gained 2 pounds and half an inch in 2 months. He's growing fast!

He doesn't have many words, but he has a couple new ones. He says "agua" (water is Spanish) and sort of says "hola" and "avion" (airplane; it's not very clear but I understand him). He also says "hi" and "hop". Hop comes from one his favorite books at the time, Pouch. And he sort of hops around when he says it. It's adorable.

We're taking him to a gymnastics class, and he loves it. He doesn't use every apparatus, but the ones he does, he loves.

He still loves dancing. His favorite song right now is "Moves like Jagger" by Maroon 5 ft. Christina Aguilera. And last night he was taping on the table, and it actually had some melody to it. I was very impressed.

He also enjoys giving Joan Buddha bellies, feet, whatever he can grab. And dancing with her feet. She usually smiles at this, though every now and then, she's not amused... But he's gentle with her more often than not, which is an improvement.

I'm so in love with our girl.

She weighs 14 lbs 7 oz, and is 26.5 inches long. She's great. She's getting stronger every day. She loves sitting and standing (assisted). She giggles every time I help her to stand. She loves eating her hands and looking at them.She's not too into toys yet.

She also likes when Evan is gentle and playful. He makes her smile. And when we're reading books with Evan (and she's almost always there), she pays a lot of attention. I can tell she's going to love books, just like her brother.

She never cared for the binky, didn't use it at all and would spit it out. But now, she really into it. We still haven't decided if that's a good thing of a bad thing...

She's more demanding of attention, but she's still very laid back, and just a chilled, happy baby.

Evan has always been a great sleeper. He used to wake up only once to eat, and when we got rid of that feeding, he started sleeping all night, 11-12 hrs per night, plus his two 1-2 hr naps. As any kid, he would get crappy sleep when teething, but after the teething episode was done, so were the sleeping problems: he would go back to his normal schedule. He learned to put himself to sleep since he was a baby, and we completely faced out any rocking and feeding to sleep long time ago. I would put him down still awake, and he would turn and fall asleep.

Right now it's a whole different story. About three weeks ago he started refusing one of his naps. Not every day, but often. We've been there before, especially during teething, and he always goes back to his two nap schedule after a few days. But this time he started napping worse, and after a very good streak of no night wakings at all for something like two consecutive weeks, he started waking up at night. When he wakes up screaming, it's usually nightmares, so we used to go, give him a hug and put him back down, and he used to go back to sleep.

No more. Somehow we got sucked into staying in his room until he fell asleep, and now he won't have it any other way. At first it was only at bedtime, but it was also during any night waking (which as I mentioned, became far more regular), and finally nap time as well. So EVERY time he goes to sleep.

And when he wakes up at night, it can take a couple of hours for us to be able to leave his room. Sometimes he goes back to sleep, but wakes up every half hour or so, so we end up back there sooner rather than later. But other nights, the really bad nights, he won't go to sleep for hours. He's just checking on us, making sure we're still there, every few minutes.

In a moment of desperation, we tried to let him cry it out, though I'm really opposed to it. Maybe you're one of those who think it won't work if you don't believe in it. That's fine, but we really tried, and it still didn't work. Four nights we let him cry and cry, and four nights he cried and screamed for almost 4 hours.

So, ok, perhaps we didn't do it right. The first night, after 3.5 hours, DH grabbed him and slept with him in the guest bed... The second night we finally stayed in the room for the 2 minutes it took him to fall asleep. But the third night I only went in once, after 2 hours just to check on him, and he finally cried himself to sleep, after over 4 hours. The forth night, after all that crying, Evan had a sore throat, and though we let him cry for another 4 hours, we decided to stop.

So here we are, staying in his room until he falls asleep, even when he wakes up several times at night, and trying to get him into a new one-nap schedule.

Thank goodness Joan sleeps all night. I can't imagine having two kids waking up at night!

You wouldn't know it by looking at this picture (she's relaxing), but our little girl is a chatterbox! if she gets your attention, she'll start babbling happily. I wonder what stories she's telling me. I wonder if she's telling me about her brother when her tone changes and sounds annoyed. But mostly it's happy chatter, and I love it.

She's more attentive, a little more demanding of my attention too, but still pretty perfect and adorable. She sleeps all night and naps when I take Evan to the park. She won't let me nap, but that's ok.

She's very aware of Evan, and she now knows that if she cries when Evan is doing something to her, I'll put some distance between them. Sometimes she has every right to cry, because Evan isn't always gentle, but sometimes she just cries to get away. Ah, yes, she's a little sister and she knows how to work the system!