Sleep

Why, oh why, does sleep have to be SO difficult in our house??!! That is BY FAR the hardest issue we've dealt with, now with both boys. Sleeping through the night is not the hard part.....at least right now. Grant woke up a lot from 7 to 11 months, and Drew has sporadically woken up at random times.....but for the past week he's been sleeping straight through.

With Grant, I got in the habit of nursing or rocking him to sleep as a baby. This was fine until he started waking up in the middle of the night (at 7 months), and couldn't settle himself back to sleep. So finally at 11 months, I got so sick of it and just let him cry it out for a few nights. And it worked! So this time, I vowed to not rock or nurse Drew to sleep every night, because I didn't want the same thing to happen. And......for a while, I did well.....I'd let him fall asleep in my arms sometimes, but then I'd also just lay him in his crib awake other times. But then I gradually got lazy......after all, it is much easier (in the short term) to lay him down when he's asleep (not having to worry about him crying and waking Grant up, and also just being able to immediately get to work on whatever I want to do during his nap!).

So, in the past week I've really been trying to institute a bedtime/naptime routine (which apparently you're supposed to start at 4-5 months, and he's 7 months old now!). This is SO hard for me. I am not a routine-driven person myself......I love just going with the flow, which I know is not good for little kids! And.....Drew isn't really keen about the idea of having a naptime/bedtime routine, either.....he doesn't care about books or singing songs at this point. He just wants to be nursed to sleep like he's been doing for the past month! So usually he screams and cries until I come back in, and this goes on for a while before he finally gives up. But I am still inconsistent.....I know the sleep training could be over in two days (like with Grant), but sometimes I'll feel so sorry for him if he's been screaming for 15 minutes, so I'll pick him up and let him fall asleep in my arms. As a mom, you just feel so torn about these things....

So anyway, I would love to be one of those moms who puts her kids down for naps and leaves the room, knowing they will go straight to sleep and wake up 2 hours later. As I sat down to write this, both boys were screaming in their rooms (we went to Katy today so they're taking really late naps). Now they have both gone to sleep.....thank you, God!

More tomorrow on our trip to Katy.....blogging every day is more difficult than I expected!

A new favorite

These days, I spend pretty much every minute from 5:45am (yes, that is the time Grant and Drew have been waking up lately) until 7:30 or 8pm with my boys. I love them more than I can describe, but some moments I just feel so bored, and I yearn for things that aren't baby/child related.

A while back (I think it was while I was sleeping on the couch when Drew was a newborn), I came across the TLC show called "Say Yes to the Dress." It's about a wedding dress shop in NYC called Kleinfelds. Every episode, they pick two or three girls to follow around as they try on wedding dresses. I LOVE IT! A lot of the dresses at Kleinfelds are ridiculously expensive, but most of the girls they show are everyday, normal girls (despite the fact that they have $5,000 wedding dress budgets!). It is so fun to watch.....Dean will probably not be happy that I am writing this, but even he doesn't mind it too much!! I record the episodes (they come on back-to-back on Friday nights at 9pm), then watch them whenever I get a chance.

It's hard to describe, and I know I'm not the only one......when you have little kids, you can easily start feeling like you're not the same person you used to be (mostly just because you don't have much time anymore for things that interest you personally). So it's fun to watch girly shows like this that take me away from mommy thoughts for just a few minutes!

Conversations

It's been a long, hard couple of days, so I feel completely out of energy. A couple of funny things Grant has said over the past two days:

- Today he found a basket with some CDs and emptied them by the time I found him. I was irritated and asked him why he gets into things he's not supposed to have. He said, "it's okay, mommy! I'm just, like, so frustrated!" He's said "I'm just frustrated" before, but has never thrown the "like" in there before! I guess I say both of these things more than I should!

- Yesterday he sat at the computer and said he was checking his email (he does this a lot now). He said, "I'm typing email Aunt Corie. Hi Corie. Are you still at your house? I'll be there in a minute."

Idol worship

I know I say all the time that Drew absolutely adores his big brother. One of the biggest joys for me this second time around has been watching the boys interact with each other. Drew simply thinks Grant hung the moon. He watches Grant almost constantly while we're eating, he gets excited and laughs when Grant does anything silly, and just recently he gets excited when I'm changing Grant's diaper (on the floor)....he'll crawl over to him and try to grab him and mess with him! It's so funny watching him become the pesky little brother.....it puts me in a hard place because I know it must be frustrating to Grant (being climbed on!), but at the same time I can't let Grant push and hit Drew just because he's getting annoyed by it.

But I know that Grant does love his little brother, even though he never cares about going to give him kisses or anything like that. When Drew's taking a nap, he'll ask, "where's Drew?" And the other night he said, "my brother is funny."

Anyway, here are some cute pictures from the other day. Grant likes to get in Drew's bed (his old bed) and jump. Drew had so much fun playing with him and watching him.....

Really quick....

I have been reading other posts and would normally not write my own tonight, but I don't want to take a day off and mess up my promise to write every day!

Mother's Day was fun.....Grant and Dean went to church while Drew and I stayed home. We woke up late and I was just so tired (I am trying to sleep train Drew). And Drew was even more tired....so we just stayed home. But Grant and Dean brought home some chocolates after church.....Grant brought them to me and said, "Happy Mother's Day, Mommy." It was sweet! It's the first year that he MAYBE understands what some of these holidays mean.

We had a very uneventful day.....I never even took a picture with the boys! Oh well...I can take one later and no one will ever know that we didn't really take it on Mother's Day, right?

Today was another day that makes me wonder how in the world I'm going to make it through this summer!! I will go into more of that later.....but the more I think about it, I don't know how a mom survives her first summer (in Texas) with a toddler and a baby who's just started crawling. That will have to be the subject of another post.....it is almost 9pm and I need to go spend some time with my husband!