These are the kinds of shenanigans that have replaced the afternoon nap.
I mean, really, who could sleep with a brand new truck like that?
Friday, January 28, 2011
Friday, January 21, 2011
Flip Fridays: feeling a little punchy
No Flip movie today. I was able to shoot a couple of video segments but in the longer of the two Elias actually ended up essentially talking about the same things as in the first video: the big bad wolf (no longer the big fat wolf) and the "baby lights" on the camera. Cute but, you know, done. I'm also too tired to blog much and spent the first part of the evening fetching a space heater at Costco to hopefully keep Xander, the cat, from waking us up at 4 a.m. tomorrow morning. Oh, have I not shared with you the craziness that is our life amongst felines? Well, in short, they're the most neurotic cats I've ever had and I've had some crazy cats (there was a period in elementary school where I remember keeping one of those metallic-y emergency blankets on my bed to keep one of our two cats at the time from peeing on it; everyone else in my family had taken to keeping their doors closed but I felt bad and left mine open. That was my compromise. I mean, really, what's up with cats peeing on beds? In their defense, we got them as only recently tamed feral kittens. Not sure what Xander's excuse is.) Anyway, the short story is that Xander meows incessantly. Mostly for food but more and more lately for mysterious reasons and at all hours of the night. On and off over the past month, he's taken to beginning this incessant meowing, despite having a waterfall of never-ending dry food mere feet away in the kitchen, around 4 a.m. and continuing off and on until we wake up...I mean, get up since, obviously, we're already awake by then, at 6:30. We've tried a number of things, trying desperately to make this human-feline co-existence continue as harmoniously as possible (since, really, who's going to take this cat off our hands?). We no longer feed them wet food in the morning; we're back to their dry food being out all the time and frankly, I don't care how fat they get. We brush Xander almost every night. We let him cozy up between us on the couch while we watch t.v. We happily welcome the cats to sleep on our feet through the night. If only they'll keep quiet. But they won't. Well, Xander won't. Ironically, Sophie, the other cat, is the one who seems most distressed by Elias's full-on toddler boy behavior, with the chasing, and the screaming and whatnot, but all she does is spend a lot of time in my closet. I feel a little bad for her but I'm glad she doesn't take it out on us vocally.
So, anyway, over the past couple of nights Elias too has been waking up but within the first couple of hours after we go to bed. So a typical night this week went a little something like this: in bed around 10, first wake-up around 11:30 on the part of Elias, partly due to what we guess is a bad dream, partly due to a mild cough he has. It took us almost two hours, on and off, to get him back to sleep. Second wake-up around 3:30, this time just enough meowing from Xander to fully wake me up. I believe the night in question he settled in eventually only to begin meowing again at 5:30, settling down and allowing me to fall back asleep just in time for the alarm to go off at 6:30. Yeah, not so great for sleeping. Repeat and what you have is crazy-making. I can't even write a complete sentence, for crying out loud. He's even woken up Elias a couple of times. One early morning he started doing his thing and we heard Elias yell, "No!" Word, little dude. When your cat is waking up your toddler at the break of dawn, there is something seriously dysfunctional about your world.
So hopefully this space heater will keep the precious little feline warm and, most importantly, out of our bedroom and quiet, and I can get back to my regularly scheduled program next Friday. In the meantime, here's a still shot from a return visit to Fairyland today.
Look at Elias taking off his socks and shoes? Does he think we live in Berkeley?
So, anyway, over the past couple of nights Elias too has been waking up but within the first couple of hours after we go to bed. So a typical night this week went a little something like this: in bed around 10, first wake-up around 11:30 on the part of Elias, partly due to what we guess is a bad dream, partly due to a mild cough he has. It took us almost two hours, on and off, to get him back to sleep. Second wake-up around 3:30, this time just enough meowing from Xander to fully wake me up. I believe the night in question he settled in eventually only to begin meowing again at 5:30, settling down and allowing me to fall back asleep just in time for the alarm to go off at 6:30. Yeah, not so great for sleeping. Repeat and what you have is crazy-making. I can't even write a complete sentence, for crying out loud. He's even woken up Elias a couple of times. One early morning he started doing his thing and we heard Elias yell, "No!" Word, little dude. When your cat is waking up your toddler at the break of dawn, there is something seriously dysfunctional about your world.
So hopefully this space heater will keep the precious little feline warm and, most importantly, out of our bedroom and quiet, and I can get back to my regularly scheduled program next Friday. In the meantime, here's a still shot from a return visit to Fairyland today.
Look at Elias taking off his socks and shoes? Does he think we live in Berkeley?
Friday, January 14, 2011
Flip Fridays: a boy, a girl, and a train
I mean, does it get any better than that? Today's installation of the Flip Friday series wasn't shot with my Flip camera. Alas, I used my phone. But it still works alliteratively (is that a word?). As in phat with a "ph." Anyway, for this week's "mommy day" we met up with one of Elias's best buds from daycare, Hazel, also home on Fridays, who's almost exactly the same age - just four days his junior. He was really excited last night and all morning leading up to our outing about Hazel's first visit to Fairyland and in particular her first ride on the "jolly trolly," easily his favorite thing about the place. Here's video from that ride:
If you're familiar with toddlers, you might be able to foresee, in those final seconds of the video, the minor tantrum that was to follow on the part of jolly trolly novice, Hazel. Exiting the jolly trolly for the first time is tough. Elias has been there. Nothing a little time in the Alice in Wonderland maze couldn't fix.
And in discovering, months after getting this new gadget, how to extract video from my phone, I came across the following, much shorter video taken not long after we moved into our new house last August and headed, one nap-less weekend, to Babies R Us to buy a water table for our back yard so that we might extend our yard-taming sessions.
This is about when Elias really started to drop the afternoon nap - not just occasionally, and not just fighting it, but very rarely napping in his crib on the days he was home. And here's a very similar scene from just this afternoon:
Despite the fact that he clearly still needs an afternoon snooze, as of the New Year we've officially thrown in the towel on the nap. We've threatened doing so before but he'd throw in a magical, two-hour nap all of a sudden and we'd be convinced it was just a phase. Of the week and a half he was home around Christmas, however, he napped once. It was becoming pretty maddening, to say the least, to continue to structure our days home around a nap that only happened about 10% of the time. And instead of viewing this non-sleeping time in the crib as restorative in a "quiet time" sort of way, Elias started getting really worked up by the end of these sessions and then becoming completely unbearable by about 5:30 that evening. Expectations needed to change. So as of the New Year or so we've been, more or less successfully (knock on virtual wood) implementing afternoon "quiet time", starting with 20 minutes and working our way up, so far, to 45 minutes. Last weekend he actually feel asleep on his own, on a bunch of blankets on the floor, two out of the three days he was home. In fact the first time that we timed it, I used a kitchen-type timer not at all expecting him to actually sleep. But he did and of course the timer, when it went off after a half-hour woke him up. Go figure. So we quickly modified our quiet time routine to included a timed projection using his SoundSpa, silent when it ends. He doesn't sleep every time, but he stays in his room and everyone gets a much-needed break from one another. Another transition successfully navigated. For now.
If you're familiar with toddlers, you might be able to foresee, in those final seconds of the video, the minor tantrum that was to follow on the part of jolly trolly novice, Hazel. Exiting the jolly trolly for the first time is tough. Elias has been there. Nothing a little time in the Alice in Wonderland maze couldn't fix.
And in discovering, months after getting this new gadget, how to extract video from my phone, I came across the following, much shorter video taken not long after we moved into our new house last August and headed, one nap-less weekend, to Babies R Us to buy a water table for our back yard so that we might extend our yard-taming sessions.
This is about when Elias really started to drop the afternoon nap - not just occasionally, and not just fighting it, but very rarely napping in his crib on the days he was home. And here's a very similar scene from just this afternoon:
Despite the fact that he clearly still needs an afternoon snooze, as of the New Year we've officially thrown in the towel on the nap. We've threatened doing so before but he'd throw in a magical, two-hour nap all of a sudden and we'd be convinced it was just a phase. Of the week and a half he was home around Christmas, however, he napped once. It was becoming pretty maddening, to say the least, to continue to structure our days home around a nap that only happened about 10% of the time. And instead of viewing this non-sleeping time in the crib as restorative in a "quiet time" sort of way, Elias started getting really worked up by the end of these sessions and then becoming completely unbearable by about 5:30 that evening. Expectations needed to change. So as of the New Year or so we've been, more or less successfully (knock on virtual wood) implementing afternoon "quiet time", starting with 20 minutes and working our way up, so far, to 45 minutes. Last weekend he actually feel asleep on his own, on a bunch of blankets on the floor, two out of the three days he was home. In fact the first time that we timed it, I used a kitchen-type timer not at all expecting him to actually sleep. But he did and of course the timer, when it went off after a half-hour woke him up. Go figure. So we quickly modified our quiet time routine to included a timed projection using his SoundSpa, silent when it ends. He doesn't sleep every time, but he stays in his room and everyone gets a much-needed break from one another. Another transition successfully navigated. For now.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Flip Fridays: The Big Fat Wolf
In an effort to blog a little more regularly, I'm starting an alliterative blog series - Flip Fridays! (Because what else am I going to do on a Friday night?!) My Dad gave us a Flip camcorder over a year ago but since we can shoot video on both of our phones and our camera, it hasn't seen a whole lot of action. The only problem with that is, even if I do take video, I'm unlikely to be the one to download and process it. I'm hoping the Flip will help in this department and give me a weekly blog subject. And video is great for this stage in Elias's baby/toddlerhood since some of the best things about our days together lately are what he says or sings or dances. Things best captured in motion pictures. You get the idea. So here goes.
So today he was playing drums on the container that his set of wooden blocks, a Christmas gift from Grandma Joanne, came in. Clever guy, right? But you'll see the drumming quickly morphs into a discussion about the "big fat wolf." Ever since Elias watched the Blue's Clues episode in which Steve tries to piece together the clues to Blue's favorite story - The Three Little Pigs - he's a little freaked out about the whole wolf part. He seems to think he's hearing something in the house that is the "big fat wolf," as he calls him. This has resulted in a little more snuggling than is typical for Elias, which you see in the second half of the video. And in that minute or so, the conversation morphs again into an investigation of the various lights on the Flip camera, including "baby lights" that mysteriously never come on. I'm biased, obviously, but it's pretty darn cute. Speaking of pigs, how 'bout that nose, huh?
Anyway, enough with the tell, now for the show:
So today he was playing drums on the container that his set of wooden blocks, a Christmas gift from Grandma Joanne, came in. Clever guy, right? But you'll see the drumming quickly morphs into a discussion about the "big fat wolf." Ever since Elias watched the Blue's Clues episode in which Steve tries to piece together the clues to Blue's favorite story - The Three Little Pigs - he's a little freaked out about the whole wolf part. He seems to think he's hearing something in the house that is the "big fat wolf," as he calls him. This has resulted in a little more snuggling than is typical for Elias, which you see in the second half of the video. And in that minute or so, the conversation morphs again into an investigation of the various lights on the Flip camera, including "baby lights" that mysteriously never come on. I'm biased, obviously, but it's pretty darn cute. Speaking of pigs, how 'bout that nose, huh?
Anyway, enough with the tell, now for the show:
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