While Liz is in Italy, I get to single mom it

Super exciting news for Liz is that she is in Italy for 10 days!  Super unexciting news for me is I am not and I am currently working full time and taking care of a high energy toddler.  Honestly, with Liz’s surgeries this year, we have this routine down.  If you think about it,  Jude has been at the nannies or with other people caring for him for about a whole half year with me taking care of both of us and sometimes Liz too.  Not all at once, but when you add it up, it is a long time.  So, that part we are used to.  We get by as best we can and cling to each other a lot:) Not to say it is easy, but Jude and I get a rhythm of get up together go to nannies, come home and have a bottle and a cartoon, read a bunch of books, snuggle and go to bed.  In all honesty, there is not much time as I leave for work around 8:20 am in the morning to get Jude to the nannies and then I pick him up around 7:30pm at night and have been putting him to bed at 9pm.  We are BUSY during the week.  It is a routine of get home- get a bottle, feed the dogs and feed myself and get ready for bed. Crash into bed between 9 and 10 for me and get up and do it all over again.

The big difference for me this time is all the alone time.  I basically invited myself over for dinner to a friends on Sunday because I had spent all weekend with just Jude other than random trips to places and one short pre-nap visit to a friends.  He was SUPER good all weekend and all week, but it is REALLY hard for this very social mama to be with just a toddler all day. Fortunately, when I called our friends R and T, they came to the rescue again and let me come over there with Jude for a few hours on Sunday night.  They are soo sweet and save our little family over and over again in so many ways:)

It is only Tuesday.  It feels like my wife has been gone forever and she does not get back until Saturday night.  Jude and I ran all over the place over the weekend.  We went to the part multiple times everyday, went to an October event at the YMCA and to Target and such.

We have Skyped a few times with Liz which has been nice.

The super cool thing about Jude right now is that he is learning about a word a day.  He now can say, “love you, night night, bye, hi, mama, Emma (one of our dogs), dog, cat, more, one and can make the sounds of a dog, cat, bird, cow, sheep, 3 singing pigs(la la la), monkey, lion, dinosaur, bear,  and we have even taught him to tell us what a fox says, which he will dance and make funny noises to. (if you don’t know what I am talking about, google “what does a fox say” and watch the video as it is hilarious).  There is a new word all the time. Yesterday he said “nice” and today he learned “night night”.  It’s pretty amazing to see him learn right before my eyes.  He can also identify animals and colors.  I have been working on counting with him, but he just says, “one, one, one, one” for all the different numbers.  It is still pretty cute.

I love this age.  He is cuddly, but wants his independence.  He pushed me out of his room the other day because he wanted to play by himself.  My little Aquarius is already demanding his alone time:)

Alright, well this tired mama needs to go to bed as we have another long day tomorrow!
-S

Toddler Bed

Jude is officially growing up too fast, about two weeks ago my little baby went from sleeping in a crib to transitioning to a toddler bed.  I guess transition isn’t the right word, he went right from one to the other.  My boy is a natural climber and I think it was only a matter of time before he climbed out of his crib, but I was hoping that wouldn’t happen for another six months at least.  Wrong.  About two weeks ago I put him down for a nap and he was fussy and didn’t want to go down.  So I closed the door to let him cry and about ten minutes later along with the crying I hear a drawer slam shut.  I knew there wasn’t any way in his crib he could reach any drawers so I ran in to investigate.  And there he was, on the ground outside of his crib crying.  Oh boy, he had climbed out.  That day he didn’t end up taking a nap as I couldn’t trust him in the crib.  This was only my second day “back on the job” so to speak after my recovery from my hysterectomy.  I was so tired by the end of the day!  Luckily our crib converts to a toddler bed so I took the front bar off and boom, toddler bed.  He was really tired that night from not napping so he went to sleep easy that night, no problems.

The next day I went again to put him down for a nap and he lays down for about 5 minutes and then realized, hey wait a minute, I can get out of this bed!  So up he jumped and he played around in his room, which is very well baby proofed and stripped down to almost nothing at this point, but then he got up on his toddler bed and from there climbed onto his attached changing table.  Crap!  Luckily we had gotten a video monitor recently so I saw the whole thing.  I ran in and firmly told him no and put him back in his bed where he cried for like .2 seconds and then fell asleep.  I watched that video monitor like a hawk the rest of his nap in fear he would climb on the table again.  Once he got up I took apart the changing table too.

Since then naps and bedtime have gone better than I thought they would have.  About 90% of the time he stays in bed after we put him there and goes to sleep.  The rest of the time he gets up and plays or cries and eventually climbs back into bed and goes to sleep.  The only problem we have really been having is in the middle of the night if he wakes up he is next to impossible to get back down in the toddler bed.  So on those nights he ends up in bed with us, which isn’t too bad for me but a bit worse for S because he likes to sleep on top of her and kicks his little feet the whole time.  Not the best way for mama to sleep!
-Liz