Frosts's birthday

Every night as he goes to sleep Frost tells me he thinks about his birthday party. He plans it to be like a game of chase at school where he gets lots of cool presents *from us*.

He is full of desires - triggered by ads on TV and by passing interests - but has certain themes which recur. As of today, these are the things Frost has put on his birthday wish list (for later discussion with Grandparents!):

1) Star Wars lego minifigures especially Darth Vader and some guys with lightsabers. These are hard to procure and you end up having to buy a set such as this one to get lots of "the guys":


2) The Castle Skull Fortress by Papo


3) A playmobil Knights Market Shop


4) 3 Playmobil Green Dragon knights (& their leader)



5) Some bad guys from Papo.





6) Candy


Frost has decided to sell his current Playmobil castle and a big truck to raise money for some of his hoped-for gifts including this new castle. We shall see if this works out.

Day 7 and the hacky sack

Wren has a new favorite toy - an old orange and plaid hacky sack of Josh's. He loves to hold it and shake it and chew it and drop it. Unlike many other toys he can play with this for an extended period. He is very driven to chew and drool and his greatest excitement is getting hold of handfulls of hair and tugging. He also laughs when Joshua pretends to bite his tummy or shoulder. I think he is ticklish.

Tonight is very hot and both Wren and Frost tossed and turned before getting to sleep. Last night Wren slept very well despite an unscheduled 4am wakeup when I left the alarm on by mistake. I nursed him since we were all wake and he had trouble getting back to sleep (was chatting and kicking in the crib) then slept in till 7.15am so we had an easy day with the 3 naps fitting in just fine.

He is napping much better now he is being kept up shorter periods between naps. He never wakes in less than an hour and has slept for over 1.5 hours at a naptime two days in a row.

Tonight I am going to see what happens if I don't wake him to nurse at all after 10pm.

Sleep Training Day 6

In less than a week life has been transformed. Wren goes to bed around 8pm without crying or nursing. I nurse him in his sleep when I come to bed and again around 4am and he wakes at 6.15am. He is still a bit restless from 4am-6ish and I am working to eliminate that 4am nursing in case it wakes him from a deep sleep period and he has trouble settling in again.

This morning I nursed him when he woke and he slept till 7.30am!

Yesterday we started putting him down to nap after 2 hours awake or when he looked tired. This was substantially sooner than the schedule I had been following for the past 5 days. His naps when MUCH better this way - perhaps avoiding him becoming overtired. He napped 1 hour each nap, almost 2 hours one nap and had a little short 4th nap from which I woke him to make sure he would be tired at bedtime.

Tonight I am going to try and not wake him for his 4am nursing and see when he complains.

He is a happy fat chunker - weighed 19.5 lbs at the naturopath yesterday. It was so great to be able to see a naturopath instead of a specialist allopathic doctor. We talked about Wren's eczema and food introduction. When he is 6 mths we are going to start with yams, pear, apple purees with a few drops of a mild prescription iron. He is to have no grains for 3-4 months longer due to Frost's gluten problems and his eczema.

Today we are going garage sale-ing.

The Shrieker from the Black Lagoon

I have been so mesmerised by sleep training that I have neglected to update about all the fun things that Wren is doing lately. Firstly, from the title, Wren is shrieking up a storm. He loves to make loud noises and smiles when you copy him and shriek back.

Physically, he is making many new moves. Despite rolling over both ways a week ago he is doing it no more frequently and often has to be coaxed. I would say he is on the way to mastering rolling but really rediscovers it every day when he rolls over and then lies there looking stunned. Hands are something completely different. He has a sense of supreme confidence about his hands. He grabs at anything within reach and is rather too accurate for my comfort. In the past 15 minutes he has grabbed:
1) my hair
2) My glass of water as I drank.
3) the frog on his mobile.
3) The straps on the carrier.
4) his other hand.
5) His toes.

He is very interested in food. Although I swore he wouldn't get to taste food until he was 6 months and day he has already sampled watermelon and banana in tiny tastes. He chomps them seriously and swallows. Once, I gave him a small piece of banana to mash in his hands and he spent a while industriously mashing it up and then tasting it from his fingers. I actually allowed him to wrench the piece off the banana and after that he was very very eager to get the banana back and shouted and cried when it was out of reach.

Now the sleep stuff. Okay, I have never been an advocate of crying-it-out techniques of sleep training except as a last resort. I am having to rethink. My life is 100% better since we started sleep training. I get 3hrs in a row almost every night and even when I dont' I sleep better because the interuptions are shorter, sort-of-planned and happen in the early hours of the morning rather than midnight till 3am when I used to have trouble. The past two nights wren has put himself to sleep without any fussing and I have caught him before he woke to nurse twice. He still gets up too early but that is a much easier problem to cope with.

Tonight, I plan to elimate the 1am nursing so he will go from 10pm till 4am. I anticipate a waking or two while he becomes used to this but he has only been nursing for 5mins or less at 1am so he won't be suddenly starved. If he can learn to sleep 10pm till 4am I will be super excited (even more sooper excited than I am!) The book says he can sleep 11 hours easily without nursing but I am lacking a bit of faith on that count.

Meanwhile, with all my new found alertness I have been catching up with tasks around the house. I have been selling off unwanted things from the basement and have made about $100 in dribs and drabs. Of course I am also buying from Craigslist so I may not have any net gain yet. I am often stunned by the things people buy and sell on Craigslist. Today, I noticed someone offering this choice item: "Dark wood oval coffee table (dog bites on the edges)"

I have also been doing some gardening and preparing for summer by getting water balloons and an inflatable boat. By the time real summer comes around many essential items will be out of stock in our local shops - displaced by the fall merchandise two months early. I cannot fathom this except to say that I must be the most disorganized consumer to be caught by this marketing strategy year after year. Until this year!

Now, Wren has woken from one of his 3 scheduled naps and despite "the book's" theory he seems unwilling to use the last 20 minutes of allotted naptime. I think I will work on naps more vigorously when he is sleeping reliably at night. Now I will go and rescue him from the bedroom.