The sound of silence.

I know that I haven't blogged in a while, but I do have excuses. Good excuses too, I think. Jeremy has been gone a lot for work and Jack has been having some sleeping problems. So I've basically either been busy taking care of the kids by myself, or else extremely exhausted because of my lack of sleep.

Since we got back from our Texas trip at the beginning of January, Jack has been really struggling with going to bed-- for naps and at night time. He switched to a toddler bed a while back and was doing fine, but when we went to Texas he slept in a room with Jeremy. He also had an ear infection around that time, so when we got home, we kind of assumed his sleeping problems were a result of the pain in his ear.

Well, his ear healed and he was giving us just as much trouble, if not more. He started resisting any form of bedtime, and was waking up crying at all hours of the night. He then started becoming very crafty with his methods of getting us to come back to his room. He would either cry out "pray!", making us think he wanted us to pray for him, but when we went back there, he didn't want that at all, he just wanted us to take him out of his room. Then he would say things like "hug", "water", "itch" (he has very dry skin so I'm often relieving the itch with some Aveeno lotion). Well, he then started with a pretty brilliant strategy: turning his light on. The problem with the light is that we would HAVE to go turn it off, b/c we knew he wouldn't go to sleep with it on. We tried hugging him and praying for him and laying him back down-- we then tried speaking harshly to him "don't turn your light on!" and then disciplining him for turning his light on. Any kind of attention we gave only made him cry for us more. Then he started chucking his blanket, pillow, monkey and sippy cup of water over his gate. We didn't know what to do about this either b/c we didn't think he would go to sleep without all of his stuff. Well, he is crafty, but his father is even craftier. Jeremy came up with the idea of unhooking the light switch in his room. We had already thought of taking his light bulbs out, but he has the great big florescent light bulbs in his room and it would be quite a hassle. Then we thought of just turning off the breaker in his room, but that would mean losing access to all electricity in his room, and we need that for his night light and his cd player. So, last night was our first night with this new approach, and Jack got really angry when he realized he couldn't turn his light on-- he chucked all his stuff out of his room and cried for a long time, but eventually he gave up and went to sleep.

Game, set, match.

I later went in his room and put his stuff back in his bed, and put his blanket back on him-- and I also played a white noise CD on repeat (thought it may help him sleep better). He slept until 5:00-- woke up crying and we let him cry for a while without going to him. He fell back asleep and slept until 7:30! When Evie woke up a little after 7, I went to get her and saw that all of Jack's stuff was outside of his room. So I went and put it all back and put his blanket back on him. He woke up happy and much more rested than he has been for a while. Then the greatest part of all... tonight when Jeremy and I laid him down to sleep for the night, he sat with us, let us read books to him, let us pray with him, and he laid down smiling-- and did not cry once. So I think the whole "jack sleeping issue" has been resolved-- and not a minute too soon. I was getting close to my wit's end. It got so difficult that there were nights when I was so exhausted and frustrated that I would just sit and cry.

Jeremy is my hero.



This lack of blogging means that I haven't posted a video that I have been meaning to post for a while. It's of Evie... growling.



It's dangerous waiting to post videos of kids when they're Evie's age b/c they learn things so quickly-- so she's really not even the same as she was in this video. I think she's even moved past her growling phase.

Also, she now has two teeth-- they are kind of growing in unfortunate places -- well, I mean they are in her mouth (Man, that would be very unfortunate if they were growing somewhere else, like on her shoulder). But she has the front lower right tooth, and she's now getting the front upper right tooth. She's going to look like she got into a bar fight if she doesn't hurry up and get the other ones soon. Jack always grew his teeth very evenly. Always two (or more) at a time. He had as many teeth as Evie has the day he turned 3 months old-- and Evie's 7 1/2 months now.

I guess I can add a few pictures. I took these pictures today. Jack refused to take off his ski cap when he went to nursery this morning (I've had to refer to toboggans as "ski caps" here b/c apparently these crazy people refer to sleds as "toboggans." Crazy, I know!) As you can see, Jack's long hair has started producing some pretty impressive hat head.






Ok, so sorry about all the rambling up there. I'm done now, I swear.

Have a good day.