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.