Sleeping solo

We are a house of sleep-challenged folks.  I don't know how it is for everyone, but I've definitely struggled with sharing-a-bed sleep difficulties since being married. I am not sure if it's just that I'm an extremely light sleeper, and even having Kelvin roll over in (our king-sized) bed, tug on the blanket a bit (I know some couples who each have their own blanket), or get up to use the restroom in the middle of the night wakes me from slumber (and sometimes it's hard to get back to a deep sleep).  A quick google search confirmed that apparently I'm not alone (anywhere from a quarter to a whopping sixty percent of people say they sleep more restfully when they sleep alone). I could probably count on one hand the number of nights I've slept more than six uninterrupted hours in the last five years.

Adding kids is a whole separate issue (and I think it makes parents, at least myself, literally sleep obsessed [I'm sure I've written about dozen blog posts about sleep issues]). I have never (personally or professionally) been a fan of co-sleeping (bed- or room-sharing); however, both of our kids did sleep in the room with us for several months especially when they were nursing frequently. Both were in a Snuggle-nest thingie in the bed or in a pack and play for about 6-8 weeks. Iver then room-shared in a pack-and-play until moving to a crib down the hall when he was about three months old, while Niall (the far better sleeper) was in a crib in our bedroom until about 10 months, when he (sleeping through the night) moved in with Iver. I would have loved to move Niall out earlier, but we didn't have a great place to put him and were nervous about the transition to sharing a room with his brother (the not-great sleeper, who finally learned to sleep through the night at 19 months, the age that Niall is now [!] and who did a year or more of 4:40 a.m. up-for-the-day wakings!). (The move actually went great and they both slept until close to 6 a.m. until the last couple of weeks).


I feel it's fair to say that having kids makes one a lighter sleeper (some evolutionary mechanism to prevent a lion from stealing your baby in the middle of the night?). Even when Niall moved down to one night waking, it took me a long time for my body to not wake up at midnight, and even though he's been sleeping through the night for about ten months, my body still wakes me between 2-3 a.m. most nights, about 4-5 hours after I go to sleep, and I struggle with frequent wakings about hourly thereafter, until I get up at 5:30 to shower and get ready for the day.  Even when my kids sleep, I feel like I don't (or I have a dog trying to snuggle next to my chest-- yes, Pepper is allowed in our bed). It's frustrating.

Anyway, back to "sleeping solo"/our recent sleeping arrangement. We had four people sleeping in four different rooms last week.  I was on OB call for six out of eight days/nights last week, and as a result, Kelvin moved to sleep in our guest room so that he wouldn't be woken by my phone ringing in the middle of the night.  Niall recently started doing some early waking (like 5:00), which made us nervous, as Iver (who isn't napping much these days) has been miraculously staying in bed until 6:00 (which has been a great wake-up time in my opinion and was the norm for many months). We're not quite sure the etiology (cold? hungry?), as 5 a.m. seems a bit early, with a 7:30 or 8 p.m. bedtime and ~2-hour afternoon nap. Our sleep bible The Happy Sleeper suggests that you do some cry-it-out (we have the ok-to-wake light in the room) to encourage the child to return to sleep until the acceptable hour, and it may take 2-3 weeks to self-correct (they recommend not moving bedtime later). For a few days, the wake-ups definitely got better, but in the meantime, we moved Iver to the office futon with white noise so that he wouldn't be woken by crying (and Kelvin and I both were sleeping in our respective "rooms" with white noise on.  Iver's even taken to calling our master bedroom "mama's room" now!).

Iver moved back in with Niall last night as the kids' room is warmer, and somehow thankfully slept through 45 minutes of morning crying, but the early wake-up for our youngest continued today. Kelvin will likely be back in "mama's room" for at least a night as I'm not on call (until tomorrow); however, I wonder how all of our sleep quality will be...

Sigh.  How do you get four different people to sleep well with room-sharing and different body rhythms, bedtimes, sleep needs, etc.?   It seems to be an eternal struggle.

 

Math before breakfast

 

Iver (who will turn five in December), our "numbers guy," has been showing a lot of interest in math lately. In the car or shower (with papa), he likes to be quizzed on simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication.

This past week, Kelvin showed him how to do two-digit addition and subtraction on his little doodle board and it's the first thing he wants to do every morning before even breakfast ("write a problem for me to solve, papa (or mama)!").

 

Proud of themselves for morning accomplishments-- Iver for doing two-column (? second- or third-grade) math and Niall (19 mo) for doing his business on the toilet and saving us a diaper/some clean-up.

 He has even figured out subtraction with "borrowing" (or "regrouping" as I think it's formally called)!

I loved math as a school-aged child. The logic and reasoning felt very good to my left-sided brain and I remember "saving" math parts of summer workbooks until the end because it was my favorite subject. It's cool to see my little not-even-school-aged-yet child enjoy it, too!

Reading, doing higher math.... I wonder what he'll be learning by the time he starts Kindergarten in a year!

Park Dangling

 Iver loves to do monkey bars, hang, and do backwards flips on the park bars.

Niall's latest trick is dangling. 

Thank goodness for public parks and sunny weather!

Ocean Creatures in Trinidad

Trinidad is a tiny, cute fishing town (a former whaling post) about ten miles north of us on the 101 with great beach access and stunning seaside views (and from where you can sometimes see migrating whales).

A couple of weekends ago, Iver accompanied Kelvin to a physicians' dinner and hung out at Moonstone Beach (and then we went there for some family hangout time on the following Sunday afternoon).

Trinidad also houses Humboldt State University's Marine Lab, which is where the Oceanography majors study and which is like a mini-aquarium (it had jellies, an octopus, many rock fish, some eels) complete with a touch tank (which included some sea stars, urchins, sea anemones, and sea cucumbers). It's free to visit, and I can't believe we hadn't yet been there with the kids. We took them on Saturday, and they had a great time!

"Niall, you have to be gentle with these creatures!"

We then spent a little time on a very sunny day (although it was about 65 degrees; don't be fooled by the kids' gear!) at the nearby shoreline.

Beach babes

We have had a glorious (warm for Humboldt) summer, and it's so wonderful to be this close to the magical Pacific ocean.  It's definitely feeling more fall-like (the rain set in yesterday) and we're not sure how many more beach-appropriate days we'll have until next year. 

Solo parenting

via GIPHY


Solo parenting is no joke.

I don't think I've had four solo days of parenting two children in our kids' young lives.
I don't know how you stay-at-home-moms do it (as my four days included weekdays when kids were in daycare).
I don't know how you single moms (or moms whose partners travel often for work or get deployed, etc.) do it, day after day.
Parenting littles alone without going bonkers is so exhaustingly difficult.

Kelvin went to Denver for a work conference from Tuesday morning until Friday night. He did ask if I'd want to make a trip of it (I love Colorado) and come along with the kids. However, child-minding while out of town is about the top of my list of "things that stress me out," so I told him that I'd prefer to just stay home with them and stick to our normal week and sleep routine. I expected it to be hard.  To be honest, I didn't expect it to be as hard as it ended up being.

In the four days, I:
- managed to shower and get ready, get get both kids dressed and fed, get the dog walked and fed, and got out of our house close to "on time" (although it was not without a lot of kids' tears "mama, hold me!" "mama, help me!", fits, screaming, curt and impatient reminders by me ("for the twelfth time, please brush your teeth," "please put on your shoes or you can go barefoot," etc.), and wearing totally thin on patience. Mornings, when kids are presumably rested, generally go okay in our house (when two parents are present), but they definitely did not go smoothly this week.  Neither polite requests by me nor sterner commands had any effect on (my older kid's) behavior, and internalizing all of my frustration only left me feeling pretty spent before I even started my workday(s). I estimated that out of waking hours, one or more people in the house was crying or screaming about 80% of the time (while I try to practice positive parenting and respectful parenting, I was far from perfect this stressful week, and one screaming person was me some of the time).

- got a glass jar perfectly stuck down our sink's garbage disposal (discovered when I was trying to grind and noticed that it didn't seem to be working). Thankfully, I was able to extract it by hand after many tries.

- had a highway rock hit my (very unlucky) car's windshield en route to picking up the kids, creating a foot-long S-shaped crack on the passenger's side (which will cost us at least our $500 insurance deductible and time spent coordinating getting the glass replaced (and camera re-calibrated by the local dealership, since it's such a new model car). 

- had two kids refuse dinner two out of the four nights I took time to cook. One child (Niall) ate a doggie fish oil capsule from Pepper's food bowl (and spit it out, as it didn't taste very good). Sigh.

via GIPHY


Except for one Thursday night at the end of the month, I thankfully I don't have any planned solo-parenting stretches for quite some time.  The kids and I are both relieved.

Little guy, big vocabulary

Niall is quite the chatty little guy these days. Bald and small (just broke 20 lbs at his 18-month check-up last week in the 4%), it's really cute and funny to see him so talkative, as he still seems so baby-like. His vocabulary has really exploded in the last month, and while I like to see my 18-month-old patients saying at least 7-10 words, I estimated that he had close to fifty, so I finally set out to count them (fifty ended up being quite an underestimate). As this blog is like my journal, this post may not be of interest to readers and is not meant to be boastful, but I think it's something I'd like to look back upon to see what my littles were doing at different stages in their young lives, as it's so easy to forget/(misremember).  I think doing baby sign language with both kids really helped them talk early (I am a huge supporter of this for all new parents!), and now Niall mainly just talks rather than signing, although he will occasionally break out the "milk" and "more" signs alongside his verbal words, and he has a couple of non-verbal words that he signs only ("please" and "thank you").

While I may have missed a few words, here are the things he says often, broken down loosely by category:

People (8)

- Mama (which he also uses for all women)

- Papa

- Iver
- "Nih" (Niall)

- Pepper

- Buddy (across-the-street cat)

- Teacher

- Baby

Animals (19)

- dog (his first sign and spoken word)

- bear, which sounds a lot like "beer!" (!)

-"dat" (cat)

- turtle

-"bir" (bird)

- deer

- duck

-"baa" (sheep)

-"neigh" (horse)

- "moo" (cow)

- "oink" (pig)

- "maa" (goat)

- bee

- whale

- weasel

- "pide" (spider)

-"nail" (snail)

- owl

- "jaf" (giraffe)

Body parts (8)
- ear
- eye
- nose
- mouth
- butt (belly button)
- hair
- teeth
- "tutti"  (breasts, as in for feeding)

He can additionally identify head, tongue, arms, hands, fingers, legs, feet, toes, knees, shoulders, and tummy.

Food (18)

- Eat!

-"NACK!" (snack)

- water (sometimes "wah-wah")

- milk

- ice

- Water(melon)

-"blue" (blueberries)

- apple
- pear

- "nana" (banana)

- "ma-go"  (mango) 
- yogurt

- noodle

- bread

- bar

- 'butter" (peanut butter)

- ceer (cereal)

- bamba (popular peanut snack)

Things/toys (27)

- "dat" (that)

- car

- a-plane ("airplane")

- bike

- "tee" (Key)

-  "toos" (shoes)

- "at" (hat)

- "baba" (bottle)
- bih (bib)

- book

- nail

- moon

- "tar" (star)

- "ticker" (sticker) 
- "wat" (watch)

- ball

- basketball* (see video)

- magnet

- bubble

- bath

- blocks

-"yight" (light) 

- door

- mirror

- chair 

- bed

- wagon

- MINE! (his favorite)

Action/locations/misc (20)
- bye

- all done

- "nah-nah" or "no-no" (no)

- walk

- ride

- "seep" (sleep)
- "night-night"
- "apa" (open)

- "ep" (help + sign)

- "outtide" (outside)

- up

- down
- off

- there (and "over there")

- back (as it "put it back")

- Poo-poo
- Pee-pee (he seems to understand the action!)

- "ot!" (hot)

- snap!

- Whoa!

- Uh-oh

This comes to a total of  (I think, if I counted right) 103 words/phrases (and growing by the day), which is super surprising and pretty remarkable.

Here's the post when I blogged what Iver was doing and saying at 18 months old. .

Here's a really cute video of Niall saying this only three-syllable word, "basketball."

Little guy, big communicator. Bracing myself for what he'll be saying at two.

Reader's Debut: Green Eggs and Ham

We have a handful of Dr. Seuss books floating around our house, including  Hop on Pop, The Eye Book, The Tooth Book, Cat in the Hat, and Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?. We did not own Green Eggs and Ham but I borrowed it from the library last week. Over the weekend, I read it once with Iver.


Then, two days ago, he picked up the book and started reading it himself! He does have an incredible memory but I knew it wasn't possible that he'd just memorized the entire book (which I learned contains fifty different words) in one sitting. While he knows how to read and write many words (he'll write "Happy Birthday" cards spontaneously), I haven't really seem him voluntarily try to read a sentence in an unfamiliar book (nor have we pushed him).


On his first day of pre-K, at 4 years and eight months (although I don't think attending one day of pre-K taught him how to read!), it was so interesting to see him "put it together," with catching the patterns of cadences (and rhymes  as the Seuss books are heavy with) and problem-solving through sentences. 

Since then, it's been hard to pry the book away from him (for meal times and bath time!), and I've since purchased our own copy to commemorate his first "book read."

Do you remember when you first started to read and what book it was? (I vaguely remember something called "Max the Cat.").  What are some next good early-reader books to try?

I'm so excited for this whole world (so dear to me) to be opened up to him and for a lifetime of learning.

 (excited to start pre-K-- he made the sign himself!)

Wagon o' book lovers (next to my table of books-to-read)!

Pretty Labor-free Weekend!

This weekend, I was thankful for several  things.

One is that I was only ever in labor for ten total hours (seven with Iver and three with Niall).

Another is the work of the labor movement towards progressive social and economic change for workers in this country (although we still have a long way to go), which gives us the holiday Monday year after year.

The third is that I may have just had my first ever weekend (especially a long one) during which I could say I actually felt relaxed spending time with my kids, and from which I feel rested (typically, long weekends managing damage-control have made me long for returning to my usual work-week. Caring for [keeping alive and happy] my energetic toddlers is extremely labor intensive!).


We had wonderful weather for Humboldt County, and spent a lot of time outdoors.

Kelvin set up our new family tent in our backyard, and the kids goofed around in it. Iver and Kelvin slept in it "camping" for two nights.

"pretending" to sleep

We went to Blue Lake (just slightly inland and warmer than the coast) to visit the Mad River near the Hatchery.

We had leisurely mornings and made pancakes (this non-crafty mama even made letter shapes!)

We matched!

Red team

 

Blue team

On Sunday, we joined Courtney, May, and their families, and spent the afternoon at Freshwater County Park in Eureka where the adults sat around an outdoor barbecue station (Courtney was the griller!) and the kids played in the sand and on the playground.

There is a veritable swimming hole

The kids played Uno (Niall watched Iver beat the older girls, Evelyn and Anna)

 

 

buds (Evelyn is so sweet with my boys)

Goofing off outside our house

We had some park time, lots of reading, lots of tennis-watching (the U.S. Open has been on), and good times together without dealing with inboxes, hospital calls, or other interruptions. I've stopped trying to get anything done during our weekends, but just have tried to embrace the moments and enjoy play time.  I'm hopeful our family will have more of these low-on-labor weekends to come!