the story of my life: mama edition

I don't remember where we were coming back from, and Elias hasn't done this in awhile, but a couple of weeks ago, he fell asleep in the car. I stayed out with him for a bit (always surprisingly relaxing and enjoyable), then attempted to carry him into the house, letting him stay asleep for as long as possible. Neal took this video of me trying to get comfortable on the couch, with Elias stretched out on top of me. As you can see, he had a hard time getting comfortable and eventually woke up just a few minutes after coming inside. Despite my having been out with him all day and my selfless attempts to facilitate his napping, who does he ask for in the end? Yep, you guessed it - Daddy.



This isn't the greatest picture in the world, but for comparison purposes, here we are in a similar situation just about two years ago:

What a difference a couple of years makes, huh?  I've been doing a lot of this kind of thing the past few days, looking at old pictures and watching old videos.  Looking at the baby version of our now full-fledged toddler always has the dual sense of feeling like just yesterday and a lifetime ago, all at the same time.

In other news, and as usual staying on the topic of sleep, I finally finished Elias's bedtime chart and wrote a bit about it on my other, more crafty blog.  I can report now after almost two weeks of use, that it's working pretty well, although I hate to admit not as well as I'd hoped.  We still struggle with a master staller, and I'm not fully comfortable with the reward part of it (I don't know that rewarding him with food or stuff the next morning is ideal and fear we're creating an even bigger problem), but some nights it does really seem to do the trick.  And when a star or two are left on the board, he does seem awfully happy about it the next morning. As my brother likes to say, we're staying in the fight...I'm just not sure who's winning.