In Honor of St. Patty's Day I Give You O'Roanen, Our Irish Child

(you know, as in the frustrated exclamation of "Oh, Roanen!" that is so often heard around here)

I will now curse us by announcing that Roanen has actually slept through the night IN HIS OWN BED WITHOUT WAKING UP for 12 out of the last 13 nights. It will now never happen again. Actually it was 11 of 13 nights, but one of the wakeups didn't count because Tristan was screaming so loud at midnight that he woke him up. Anyway, this started one night after we finally had the area's version of "Nanny 9-1-1", the Phoenix Centre (for "troubled" children and families) pay us a visit at Russ' request. Basically we're getting an assessment done by a therapist and we'll have an in-home worker help us out with Roanen's freakout issues. The main problem we were going to address was his fighting bedtime and the nightly trip into our bed (because those are the issues Russ has with him - I don't particularly enjoy his fits but they don't make my life miserable either) and now Roanen decided to partly fix that on his own. The problem now is that when the in-home worker comes to help us she's planning on basically using the Ferber method to get him to fall asleep on his own (much to my anti-crying-it-out dismay) and I'm worried that if he gets upset at bedtime he'll regress in the middle of the night. I was ok with the idea when it was first presented, but the more I think about it the more sick I feel about it. Since it will be a while before the worker is able to come in the evening, I'm hoping to try some gentler methods in the meantime to get him to sleep without someone being with him, kind of like we did with Josey. I'm desperate to avoid the crying, especially since the reason we originally asked for help was because we knew if we tried something like that he wouldn't stop crying. I would honestly take having to sit with him for a while at bedtime over hearing him get upset at being left alone in his bedroom. Ugh. I'm depressed thinking about it.

Also filed under "happy" - he has peed on the potty several times, mostly in the morning. I'm not full-out training him because that would be ridiculous at this point between Josey's preschool and Tristan being Tristan, but we've taken the potty out and every once and a while I ask him if he wants to sit on the potty and get a jellybean. Unlike Josey, he doesn't seem to pee much at night so if I catch him first thing in the morning he'll usually have a mega-pee that somehow manages to flood the floor around the potty. Whatever. So what if I have to soak up a huge puddle (one-handed, of course, due to Tristan freaking if I put him down) every morning. He's peeing. I'm happy.

Taking after his father, Roanen has earned the new nickname of "Chatterbox". He pretty much constantly has a monologue going, usually consisting of things like "That's a-MAZING!", "Wook at that! Oooooh, that's WEEWY WEEWY PWETTY!" and "That's a taw biwding. What a bootiful biwding!" Almost as cute as Josey's exclamations of "Wow Mommy, that's weewy wuvwy!" My boys appreciate beauty. That's why they like staring at themselves in the mirror :)