December 28th was supposed to be Emily's last bedtime bubba. The next night I put her down without one, attempted to read her a story to take its place (that never goes well, she just wants to flip the pages and eventually throw it on the ground) and said goodnight. She cried and fussed for a little while but eventually went to sleep. Ok I thought, not bad. We can do this. I washed them all and sterilized them to pack them away.
The next night was a different story. I cracked like a little girl after 2.5 hours of crying and gave her a bubba. Within a minute of finishing it, she was asleep. Maybe I am super weak, maybe after a few more nights she would have been fine, but I also feel like they have to be ready, and I just don't think she is. I know doctors say to give them up at a year, so we're already well passed that, but I've known plenty of kids who never gave up the bubba until well after their 2nd birthdays and probably later.
My favorite mantra is, no kid ever went off to college doing ______, so it won't matter if she doesn't give up the bubba until 2 or 2.5, she won't go to college (or kindergarten) still drinking a bubba. Plus, we are leaving for Disney in four weeks. I wouldn't keep her on them just for that, but since we're having troubles letting them go, why not take advantage and keep them around for Disney? She can have one during take off and landing to help keep her ears from popping too much and it will help calm her for bed if she is overtired any (most) nights.
So her latest thing has been taking off her clothes and diaper. For a while now she usually didn't make it through the night without taking her pants off if she was wearing two piece jams, but stripping down to bare butt is new. She was napping one day and I quickly glanced at the monitor and said whoa, I see a bare butt! She was sleeping nicely so I figured it could wait until she woke up. When she woke, I went in and she pointed out the poo poo on her sheets. Thankfully it wasn't a horrible mess but still. So I stripped off her top layer, and tossed her clothes and sheets in the wash.
The next morning I had to strip off the final layer of bedding since she once again took her diaper off when she poo'd. So that was the end of two piece jammies, which stinks cause she has a lot of them, and she's so cute in them. But then again I think she would be cute wearing a garbage bag. So the next night I put her in one piece jams, but when I went in the next morning, she was naked as the day she was born, jumping up and down in her crib and laughing and singing. Oye. I couldn't help but laugh though, she was having so much fun. Luckily no poo today,but she did pee so into the wash the sheets went again.
By now I figured I needed to come up with something, I don't want to wash sheets every single day. And was this a sign that she is ready for potty training? I think it could be, but I don't think she is quite there yet. She does quite well with understanding instructions, but she does not tell me or exhibit any major signs that she has to poop or pee before the fact. She'll often grab her crotch and say poo poo when all she did was pee, or she'll say it when she has done nothing at all. And when she is telling the truth, it's always after the fact.
I think she will potty train sooner rather than later, but I don't think we're quite ready yet. I also think it is a horrible idea to potty train right before a major vacation. I am nervous enough about flying with a toddler for the first time, let along having to think about taking her to potty several times on the plane, and spending most of the days looking for bathrooms at the park. And even if she does catch on fast, there is too good of a chance that being away from home and off her normal routine would cause her to regress, thus having to start all over when we get home anyway.
I also think she just likes to be naked or partially clothed and it's something new she has discovered she can do, so she does it. So I thought, these zip up jammies only had the zipper, no button tab over the top. Maybe she won't be able to figure those out. It worked for a few nights, but lately she has been walking around the house with her jammies half unzipped like a 70's male porn star, showing off her chest. So nooooowwww we're doing a onesie under her clothes and jammies. So far that has worked. If it stops working, we'll resort to backward jammies.
The other thing is she has been making several attempts to climb out of her crib. So far she has only done it when I am tucking her in and she is protesting bedtime. I let her try, because I want to see if she can succeed. So far she cannot get her leg up high enough to climb over. But I think it won't be long before she will be determined enough to figure out how. I really hope that doesn't happen for a long time, because I am not ready for her to be unrestrained in her bedroom. We requested cribs for our hotel stays in Disney, but learning from our last stay in a hotel, we are also taking a kiddie air mattress just in case we cannot get a crib. For whatever reason I thought it was a good idea to test it out the other day. Why I am not sure, because if we have no crib, the air mattress is our only option so it really doesn't matter if she does ok on it now or not.
So I tucked her in on it like usual, said goodnight and shut the door. I was able to move the camera to see her on the floor. Once she finished her bubba she was up playing for 45 minutes. I gave up, and tried to put her down in her crib but she wasn't having that, so she didn't get her nap that day. So let's hope our hotels all have a crib available. For one, so we can all have a good night's sleep, and two, so that the front desk employees don't have to face the wrath of my MIL. I love her to death and she is an amazing, kind, loving person....but don't cross anyone she loves. Her name is Donna, and there is a reason my husband always called her The Don growing up :) Or....maybe I do want to see her unleash on someone, it could be entertaining.
Speaking of Em's camera, she kept unplugging it for a while. It was plugged in right next to her crib so she could easily kick it or just unplug it. So we got a hook and strung it across the wall, plugged it into a power strip and plugged that into an outlet on the other wall, problem solved. Except it wasn't, because my child is always thinking, always plotting ways to get into mischief, so now she was sitting at the end of her crib, pulling the power strip up by the camera cord and either unplugging it or turning off the power strip.
The last couple mornings the monitor would beep, telling me she had unplugged it and it lost signal. This morning I sleepily turned the monitor off and accidentally went back to sleep. I woke up two hours later, completely confused and worried. Where was my husband? Is Em ok? Is she crying for me and I can't hear her? I walked out of our room, my husband was asleep on the couch, and I walked in Em's room and she was asleep too. She must have gave up at a certain point and just went back to sleep. Whew, all was ok. But that was a weird, scary feeling to wake up to.
I figured I would have to move the camera, which I didn't want to do so I played around with the cord first. I unhooked it from the hook we previously used to get it out of her reach, put the power strip up on a shelf, and hooked the cord around her monkey wall art. So now the cord is well out of her reach, stretches across her crib up high and is looped around the money and then the cord goes down the wall behind the nightstand. It looks incredibly bad, but it's out of her reach, I don't have to lose signal on the monitor anymore and I didn't have to do the annoying task of moving the camera. Works for me. It's funny, before the baby is born, you decorate the nursery and make it just perfect. When they're babies, it still looks really nice.
But now that she is mobile, her stuffed animals are strewn about, the glider cushions have stains on it, her clothes for the day often get tossed on the ottoman until I feel like putting them away and her room needs a good vacuuming. So of course, the ugly camera cord is the least of my worries. Why don't they make the camera cordless like the monitor is? I wouldn't want to climb up and plug the camera in each day to charge it, but surely they could make a battery that lasts a while, right? It hasn't been quite two years since we bought it, who knows, maybe it is obsolete now and they do make cordless cameras. If so I'm getting one for the next baby, cause I am sure I won't be ready to stop spying on Em yet to use that camera/monitor.
Yesterday I took Em sledding with my brother and sister in law. It was her first time, I think she had a really good time. She seemed a little unsure on the way down the hill, but never cried, and always laughed and smiled on the way back up the hill. It was a nice day for it too, cold enough for the snow, but warm enough that we weren't frozen. We walked to the hill, it was a fairly short walk so my brother pulled her in her little sled both ways. On the way there I stopped and picked up a two person sled so someone could always ride with her on the hill. We each took turns riding down with her, it was fun for us too. I hadn't been sledding in years.
Funny story, there is a nice sledding hill not far from our house too, and I always drove by it on my way home from work. One day when I was pregnant with Em, I was on my way home early because I had had a doctor appointment. I saw the hill looked great and there weren't many people on it, and I thought ooooh, I want to go sledding, maybe Ryan will want to go. Then I thought wait a minute, I'm 8 months pregnant, I can't go sledding. I have no idea why I thought I could go....it's not like I go often. I was probably in my teens the last time I went.
Emmy didn't get a nap yesterday either, so between that and being out in the fresh cold air, she was zonked afterward. I knew it was probably a bad idea to go out to dinner with them after sledding, but I hate cooking and I love to go out to eat, and she doesn't get to see them all the time, so I figured why not. She had been in the highchair for about 5 minutes when she started looking glassy eyed and then she put her head on the table. A second later she looked up, and held out her arms to me. I picked her up and I swear she was asleep before her head reached my shoulder. Luckily I ordered a salad so I was able to hold her while she slept through the whole meal as I ate. It was tough though, 25 pounds on one arm, and she was a warm little thing. And she wouldn't let me just set her on my lap and lean against me, I had to hold her up off my lap in my arm. I loved the snuggles though, she doesn't snuggle with me much anymore.
Speaking of snuggles, she woke me up much earlier than usual one day last week, around 6:30. My dad and stepmom came over that day to go have lunch and take Em to the park, so we were sitting with my dad, waiting for my stepmom to get there and within a few minutes Emily climbed in my lap and fell asleep. When my stepmom came in, she took her from me because Em was all awkward and didn't look comfy, but she woke up and wanted mommy and not Grammy. But then daddy walked in the room, she yelled daddy and went running to him with open arms. He picked her up and she laid her head on his shoulder for a good 5 minutes. It was so sweet. She loves her daddy of course, but she had never really shown THAT much excitement to see him (or anyone really) before. I wished I could have gotten that on camera.
So Em is really good at saying mama and dada now. She's said both for like a year now, and in the last several months said it in the correct context, but it's like in the last month, she finally connected all the dots, and really made the connection that me, and mama is the same thing. She'll say it now to get my attention rather than just saying it just because, or she'll say it with a smile when she is happy to see me. My husband works for a big university, so he often wears shirts and hates with the logo, so whenever she sees the logo on anything, she points to it and says dada. She's also starting calling me mommy too. I love them both, but mommy really melts my heart.
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