Happy Days and Happenings…

Doesn’t that post title just make you grin inside?  These are indeed happy days for the residents here in Smithtopia.  We’ve had all four children healthy and well for two weeks now! (…although that statement may be invalid as of this evening… here’s hoping it was just something Eagle ate and not something contageous.  Eww.  Nothing like a stomach bug for Christmas, eh?  All the other nursery kids will LOVE us for it.) 

I’ve had some pictures needing posting with their stories attached.  Took me a while to get to it, but I thought I’d take a few minutes to catalog them here now they’ve made the arduous journey from camera to computer.  Forgive me, I’m not inserting the pictures into the text like a good blogger should.  You’ll have to click on them to get a better view yourself – and I just saved myself a half-hour of playing with this stupid thing.  It’s astounding anybody visits my humble site with the lack of visual appeal.

Someday I really will fix that boring banner up there.  Really, I will.

YOUNG LOVE

Did I mention that Cinderella came home from church one day talking about her “boyfriend?”  Yes, she still has this little crush on a little boy in her Sunday School class.  No, I am not really okay with it… But I remind myself that I fell in love with a kid named Derrick in Kindergarten.  I even fought over who got to sit next to him in the storytime circle and got myself in trouble.  Me!  In trouble!  First and last time.

Anyway, she wrote him a Christmas card all on her own as we were getting into the holiday season.  Very sweet, except that she was using a card someone had written to the Bishop.  Whoops.  That’s okay, though.  She was quite happy to do it all over again with a real Christmas card.  Go ahead and click on these to see the details of her artwork.  It appears she is quite smitten.  She gave me the interpretation thereof when she was finished.  The arrows are so he’ll know to look at the picture of her.  Cute.

(Should I tell her I found out that Mr.C has lots of “girlfriends” at school, too?  Quandary.)

The following really should be its own post, but I don’t know how to get the sleeping kid pictures out of this gallery.  So…. oh well.  Here it is.

SLEEPING LIKE A BABY 

Oh, how I love our bedtime routine!!!!!!!!!!  Now if I could just get myself into one, we’d be set.  I promised the secret of how I get to Freedom to sleep through the night, so here it is.

When C was ~9mo’s old and a nightmare to put to bed, my friend recommended a book called Babywise.

I hated it.  Passionately.  Never have I wanted to throw a book through a window, before or since, but that one… Mm.  Still a fantasy of mine. 

Why?  I was a severely sleep-deprived new mother with no clue as to how to get my baby to sleep well for naps or at night.  It was all a hodge-podge of whatever-she-seemed-to-want.   Bleh.  And here was this book – supposedly the solution to all my problems – and all it did for the first 60 pages was talk about how wonderful their plan is, how smart they are, and how glorious a well-rested baby can be.

AHHHHHH!  Get to the point!  Preferably using small words and short sentences!  Please!

So here is my summary of their brilliant and effective plan.

Ready?

Sleep – Eat  – Play.  Repeat.  (Note: DO NOT feed baby to sleep.)

There ya go.  I just saved you 150 pages.  Or something like that.  (It’s been 5 years, y’know.)  You’re welcome!

At any rate, you try to get your newborn into that pattern as soon as you can (although a newborn is going to do quite a lot of sleeping).  During the day you try to keep them up to play after they eat – At night you let them go right back to sleep if they will.  When you get a baby to go to sleep w/ a not-full tummy, it means they have less likelihood they’ll wake up prematurely with tummy pain or diaper needs.  (Translation: Longer naps!  Longer naps!  Yay!!!!)

Somewhere between 9-12weeks old they start skipping their night-time meals and eventually go for a nice solid 8 hours.

It’s beautiful.

And thus far it’s worked for the three babies on which I’ve subscribed to this plan.  Yes, they get sick and throw off their groove.  Yes, teething can be disruptive.  But usually they snap right back into their healthy sleep habits.

Disclaimer:  My three boys (even as babies) were *all* significantly less “spirited” (read: colic-y, persistent, and extroverted) than their big sister.  Who knows how this would have panned out if I had tried it on her.

And ironically, Freedom is now done with his later-ish nap.  He’s experimenting with different kinds of cries and it’s kind of cute, actually.  I shall stop writing now, of course.  This post is already too long as it is, though.  Goodness!  What are you doing still reading?!  Don’t you have better things to do?

Just kidding.  I love that you’re here, that you read all my ramblingness, and that you are thinking how much you’d love to leave a comment.  You’re wonderful and I love you!  Merry Christmas!