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2008-09-29 - 1:43 a.m. previous entry next entry
Update on various things! :)
What in the wide wiggly world am I doing up at 1.45am?!?! Tsk. Anyway, I AM up, and I've lately been desperate to update my diary, but I have had no time. So, I should close this down and go directly to bed without passing Go, but here I am anyway. I will be soooo tired in the morning. *sigh* But that's my own silly fault! ;)
Okay, I just have to sort of bullet point the "news" in case I don't get a chance to update properly for ages again. I really hope to though! It's driving me nuts not to get time.
* Thanks for all the lovely compliments on my hair!!! :) What a confidence boost - I'm really grateful! xxx
* Nathan is cruising the furniture and turning himself to face out into the room when he's standing at the sofa and other things. He seems reeeally eager to walk, which Matthew never was even though he was on the move early like Nathan is. He's 8 months old!!! Or 7, adjusting his age! I'm boggled! ;)
* Nathan's sleep has been just dreeaadful all of a sudden lately. He has been doing his usual 3-4 wakings at night (yes, still), but lately started staying awake at one or two of those, and walking around and around his cot, or pulling up on me if he was next to me at the time! It has been so hard to get him back to sleep, and I have just been knackered. His day naps have been just as bad. Normally he seems to be a naturally pretty good napper, which is wonderful! He naps 3x a day and the first one is around 9am for about an hour, then around noon for maybe 90 mins or so, and then another starting between 3.30 and 4.30pm, for about 30 minutes. He's usually cranky-ish after that nap till bedtime, but only mildly so, and he's easily distracted by an interesting brother or toys/things to chew on, etc.
Anyway, the trouble was that he suddenly began taking an HOUR to go to sleep at nap time, screaming the whole time. I have had some days where I haven't had the energy to pick-up/put-down or walk/jiggle/rock for ages, so have tried going in and out of the room and letting him cry for a bit. On Thursday I was feeling ill so for two of his naps he literally cried it out, which was HORRIBLE. He cried for the best part of an hour and that didn't even result in him sleeping. He just got gaspy and gaggy and chokey and I ended up breastfeeding him again, whereupon he fell into instant unconsciousness. Nathan is not a baby for whom Crying-It-Out works, I am sure of it. Thankfully! :) I hate CIO.
Sooo, on Friday he cried for ages for nap #1, and I breastfed him again in the end (he always starts with a breastfeed, short story, and I rock him while singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star - that's his before-nap routine, and then I put him down and pat him for a bit, and then leave - that used to work! Lately he cries like he's anxious the moment I start singing, and pushes away looking at the door!). I noticed that he was pulling my top to his cheek as he breastfed, and then when I put him down in his cot, I noticed that he took hold of the corner of his flannelette sheet and held it to his cheek/lips as he fell asleep. Suddenly I had a lightbulb moment, and when it came time for his next nap, after the feed/story, I picked him up to rock him and sing to him, and gathered his soft sheet from the cot in my arms too. He instantly snuggled the corner of it to his face and lay his head against me! I sang the song, put him in the cot, and he was asleep in 3 minutes with no fuss!
I just got the feeling he was needing some form of comfort, but not me as such. He didn't want me right there in his face, but he didn't want the alternative I was offering him - to be left completely alone to sleep without any comfort. He has two little soft toys in his cot but he hasn't gravitated towards them. The sheet he likes is just a little one - moses basket size from Mothercare, too small for his cot, but it's an easy small cover to put on him if I notice he's a little chilly during his day naps.
Anyway. So it worked! I was so pleased to have figured it out! :) For his last nap of the day, I did the same thing, and he was asleep again within 5 minutes. At bedtime we usually have a little more difficulty settling him to sleep than for naps, but I tried cuddling him with the blankie sandwiched between us. He got cosy very quickly that way, and I put him in his cot. He stood up and cried for me so I went back in and picked him and his blankie up again, cuddled for a moment and put him down, and he went straight to sleep! Since then, over the weekend, it has been working well. Sometimes he likes to suck on the blankie just a little, so that he falls asleep with it at his lips. My insides turn to mush when I watch him sleeping with his lil blankie at his sweet relaxed lips like that.
Nathan is my first baby to have any specific comfort source (other than me!). So it's new territory for me! :)
* We got new windows fitted yesterday!! The sale of the end of our garden finally went through and we have a lot of money ready for the home improvements we need to do, to get ready for selling the house. Neil's wondering about finding a way to maybe rent out our home if we can't sell it, so we need to fix it up a bit anyway. The fitting was quick (8am till 4pm) but a bit of a nightmare with the kids. I stood on glass, ugh. And picked it out with finger and thumb. D'oh! The thumb wound has been more trouble than the foot, as there was a tiny sliver of glass left in it that I couldn't get out. The boys were terrified of the Very Loud Tool that was used to cut out our old windows! Poor boys! They shed many tears and wailed in terror! Neil had an MRI on his knee (he's limping a lot at the mo because he has really bad knees - lonnnng history) that morning, so we couldn't go anywhere till he got back. When he got back, we all got in the car and went to Tesco's (weyhey) and then to the library. Neil drove us around for an hour and we all napped for a bit (except poor Neil!) and then we went home to find our windows nearly done! :) It's so nice to SEE out of our windows, hehe! The old ones were awful and almost falling to bits.
* We're getting a new car!!!! Yay! Neil gets a generous car allowance at work, and he's allowed to use it for anything he wants! So we're using it to pay for a new-ish Citroen C8 over 3 years, and after that, Neil will switch the payments to go on a car that he wants to drive to work (something less transporting-the-masses oriented, hehe!). He's keeping the Ford Mondeo to drive to work right now, the one we got when Matthew was nearly due. The Chrysler Grand Voyager that we've been driving since Nathan arrived is off the road at the moment as it ran out of tax last month so it's living on our driveway! We're getting it picked up by a company who'll pay us a not-so-great amount for it, but it really isn't worth much, so I guess that's okay. I can't wait for our new car to arrive! The 3 kids will go across the middle row, and in the Chrysler we had the two little ones in the middle row (two captain's chairs there, not a bench of 3 seats), and then Arthur in the back row. He talks NON-STOP and it's so hard to hear him all the way from the back! So I am looking forward to having him in the middle row again. It is being delivered to us on Tuesday (or maybe tomorrow!!!). The boys are soooo excited! I can't wait to be able to get out and drive with them again. We have missed church for a few weeks due to no transport big enough to get us all there! And shopping couldn't be done, or trips far away from the house with the boys. Neil had a temporary car that fit us all in it over this weekend, because Citroen were meant to give us the car on Friday and they messed up so they gave him a temporary car till Tuesday.
* Matthew is talking such a lot! He can verbalise absolutely everything now, and talks in 5 word sentences a lot. He and Arthur chat continually as they play. Lately Matthew's verbal developments seem to have all been to do with intonations, casual phrases, and those little things in casual speech like ums and ers, "mmm-hmm?" type sounds, and sighs appropriate to what's being said, mannerisms to go with things he's saying, etc. His communication is generally becoming a lot more effortless and fluent. It's SO LOVELY to see and hear them chatting away as they play! They play together constantly. Along with child #2 newly learning to talk has come a certain amount of bickering and arguing, which we haven't had before! We've had the physical conflicts - never outright fighting yet, but frustrated headbutts aren't uncommon around here. *sigh* We're working on that.
They LOVE each other! It's so incredibly sweet to observe! Matthew is so sweet with his new ability to talk - he constantly praises his brothers. He'll tell Nathan, "Boob-boy, Ninny" (good boy!) when he gets down from standing safely without bashing himself on the head (we had a couple of weeks of that while he learned!), and also tells him "Care-coh, Ninny!" (careful) when Nathan is playing with something unstable or shaking a heavy toy about that could whack him in the head! When he and Arthur are doing school together, he will crane his neck to see Arthur's painting while he's doing his own, and gasp loudly and say, "Woooowww, Arshur! Pain-ping bwiwant!!" (that's "painting brilliant" by the way! ;) ). He's so excited with school. I'm so glad to have thought to shift the schedule about and include him.
* School is going great. We've now done "The Sea", "The Farm", and last week was "Harvest", which was actually a bit difficult to think of ideas to keep us going for the whole week. Their favourite activity was making combine harvesters out of kitchen roll tubes and boxes, and then painting them! I have never seen Matthew so focused and enthusiastic as when he was painting his combine harvester - much more so than Arthur was. We have a lot of their work displayed in the kitchen and he points it all out excitedly at most mealtimes, beaming away! So sweet :)
* This week coming, our school theme is "Autumn" - yay! I've been looking forward to this one. I have books from the library, a Tractor Tom DVD that's about Autumn at the farm, and a billion craft ideas up my sleeve. There's so much to LEARN too, and so many things to see outside. I have no idea how we'll fit it into one week! ;) Maybe we'll extend it to 2 weeks? I am planning to start a blogspot blog to chart my homeschooling progress, just for my own records, but also I guess for anybody who finds it helpful in their own homeschooling ventures, or just for ideas for activities for their little ones. I want to take photos of everything we do for school, and post each week with what we did for our theme, with photos. Then I will have no trouble finding it all again when I have preschoolers in the future after Arthur and Matthew have grown past that stage! It will be so helpful for me. I haven't got time at the moment, but it has been my plan to start a blogspot blog for that purpose for a while now. I'll let you know when it's set up! :)
* Did I ever get round to saying that Arthur is night-time potty trained? It's been 2 months maybe? I can't remember. He's totally dry day and night. He potty trained in the day within 5 days of starting, and I had no intention of trying him at night for a while because I'd heard that it would be a good while longer before he'd be ready for that. But after a few weeks of being day time potty trained, at bedtime one night, Arthur told me he wanted to try going to bed without a nappy! *I* was the one who ummed and uhhed and said that I wasn't sure about that, etc! I can't believe how there has been absolutely NO training required whatsoever with this boy! It's been GREAT! :)
Anyway so he was dry the next morning, and he hasn't worn a night nappy since. He has had 2 nights about 5 weeks apart when he wet the bed, and both times he woke Neil up and said his bed was wet. Both times he had been very restless during the night leading up to the wee and had had a bad dream one of the times too. BUT, he has also had about 4 or 5 nights over the weeks where he's woken Neil up in the night to tell him he needs to do a wee! He does it on the potty by the bed, and then goes back to sleep. I have also discovered that if he needs a wee while we're out, he can hold it till we get to a place where we can find a loo. He still does almost all of his stuff on the potty at home, as we're not working on transitioning to the loo yet - he can't do it independently because of all the stair gates in the way, etc. When we move, we are placing a high priority on having a downstairs toilet for that reason. We have many years of toilet training ahead of us yet! ;)
So Arthur is an absolute star with his potty training! :) I'm so proud of him! He never has accidents any more, and he also dresses and undresses himself every day - these two things combined make a MASSIVE difference in the job of getting everyone ready for the day. I now feel like I have two littlies to dress and change, and I can hand Arthur his clothes and know that he'll deal with the toilet side of things (with the exception of me having to empty whatever it is down the loo regularly! Not GREAT fun, but I'll stick with it for now!).
* Nathan is eating table food. We are so slack on starting him gradually, and often his naps have coincided with mealtimes. So finally we just started sitting him in his new booster seat at the table with the rest of us, and serving him what we're eating! He loves it. *I* love it. Baby-led weaning is the BEST! :) He's still at least 95% breastfed, and some days he really doesn't have solids as such because he sleeps at mealtimes or something. He loves to eat food though!
* He's babbling - ra-ra-ra-ra-ra, vwa-vwa-vwa-vwa, and (new!) ma-ma-ma-ma! Lots of babies his age are babbling lots more than that, or have been doing so for a while, but I don't expect him to be early OR average with speech. Both my older boys have been later than average, but caught up and overtaken shortly after they've started! ;) So I expect he'll get busy with walking in the next few months, and get around to talking around age 2, like Matthew did.
* Matthew has lately started to finally understand a few colours! He knows orange, black, yellow, and this week he told me that something was green when it WAS, and when he was painting he couldn't decide which colour to start with. He finally said, "Uhhhhmmm.... RED!" and stuck his paintbrush in the red paint enthusiastically and began to paint! I was ever so thrilled, because any of my boys could be colour-blind (red/green) and so it's a big relief when they first show me that they can tell the difference between red and green. Of course Matthew could still be colour-blind. I will have to wait till it's obvious he's telling subtle shades of red, green and brown apart. But I'm encouraged by his progress! :)
Okay now it's really late, and I've gone and written a proper diary entry! Tsk! ;) I wish I could post a photo, as I have about 200 on the camera, and a bunch on the computer, but it's too late to start fiddling with photos, so I can't! I have soooo many to post. Next time, I promise! :)
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