Let's See How Many Times I Can Use The Word "Suck" In One Form Or Another

Today I feel...wait for it...good! Pretty amazing considering how hellish the last few weeks have been. Obviously I haven't been blogging much lately and it's mostly because sleep training sucks and preschoolers suck and I don't want to relive my sucky days by writing about them at night when the suckage temporarily stops. Today, however, hasn't sucked too much so far so I'm taking a little bit of time to blog. Lucky you.
Last night was a not-so-bad night for me. Russ and I switched roles and he put Tristan to sleep while I put the boys down, something that usually ends with bad results. Luckily Tristan went down no problem (ok, so putting him to sleep hasn't been much of a problem lately) and even the boys didn't give me any grief other than Roanen crying about wanting "MY songs" but not telling me what they were. I was even able to leave the room before he was totally asleep, something that we've been working on and that I've never been able to accomplish before. In the past couple of days Tristan has been settling himself occasionally when he wakes up and he did so a couple of times before we went to bed. Naturally as soon as I got into bed he really woke up and started crying. I've been really torn about what to do when he wakes up at night. According to the Baby Whisperer I'm supposed to do pick up/put down until he goes back to sleep and he's not to be fed between 7 PM and 7 AM if he's getting enough food during the day (which I finally think he is since he's taken so well to solids). The problem is that once he gets really crying he gets so worked up that he won't settle without nursing. I'm talking hysterical crying for hours and if he DOES finally settle, it doesn't last. I haven't yet managed to go an entire night without feeding him and he calms right down and generally sleeps for a chunk after he nurses. The verdict is that I'm going to combine a couple of sleep training techniques: the Baby Whisperer stuff for when he's first going down at night or for a nap, as well as when he wakes up at night and settles back down easily with shushing, and the No-Cry Sleep Solution techniques for the middle of the night when he won't settle back down easily. Basically that means nursing him when he wakes up, but not for longer than it takes for his sucking to slow down. I have a bad habit of falling asleep on the couch in his room while I'm nursing him and it tends to make him sleep really restlessly. As well, our bed is off limits. Since I've started the sleep training he has been intolerable in our bed, fussing and wanting to nurse constantly and I can't deal with it. It's actually easier to be awake and dealing with him in his room than half-ass sleeping and dealing with him in ours.
So back to last night, I nursed Tristan right at my bedtime, then once at about 2 and once at about 5. He slept in until 7, which I was able to do as well since Russ was home until then to entertain the boys before he had to leave for work. Of course just before the 2 AM feed Roanen came into our room and climbed into bed on my side because he knew Russ would get mad at him if he went to him. I put him back in his room after the 5 AM feed, then nearly got to sleep when Josey started calling for me. When I went in to check on him he was standing in the middle of the room and he said "Mommy! What did the Backyardigans have for snack?" as which point I tossed him into his bed and went back to mine.
I realize that I probably shouldn't be thrilled about a night like that, but I feel pretty energetic and well rested today so I'll take it. The best part was to come this morning though. Around 9:15 I took Tristan upstairs for his nap, sang him a couple of songs and put him down in his crib. He wasn't overtired so he just smiled and talked to me, which I took as a sign to leave. He fussed a little bit, but 5 minutes later HE WAS ASLEEP. ASLEEP. ON HIS OWN. I REPEAT, ON HIS OWN. WITHOUT ANYONE IN THE ROOM. I mean, Roanen still has a hard time with that and Josey didn't do it until he was 2 1/2. I'm ecstatic. I'm not assuming that this will happen every time, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. Yay.

On other fronts, we have our Nanny 911-esque sessions with a home worker starting in a couple of weeks. All the assessments are done and the worker will be helping us out with sleeping (which I actually hope to resolve before she gets here), self-soothing for Roanen and Tristan and discipline. We really haven't had many problems with Roanen lately, even though he was the main reason we originally called for help. That being said, he's been standing at the glass door in the playroom for the last 20 minutes in hysterics because I *gasp* locked them in there to play with their zillions of toys so they wouldn't wake Tristan up. I'm mostly excited about the discipline part. We've been having a ton of problems with Josey lately. He refuses to listen to anything from "Please turn off the tv and get your boots on" to "Get out of Tristan's face, he's scared of you" to "Don't run into the busy road or you'll get run over". He gets physically aggressive with the younger boys and myself and is getting time-outs at preschool because of bad behaviour. Time-outs are hard because I end up having to chase him around the house when he gets one and drag him into his time-out spot. Overall sucky behaviour which will (hopefully) get resolved sometime before he's bigger than me. Too bad I can't take the car keys away.

And finally, a conversation between Josey and Roanen:

Josey: "I'm all done my granola bar, Roanen. Can I please have some of yours?"
Roanen: "Ok, Josey. Here you go"
Josey: "Thanks Roanen"
Roanen: "You're welcome Josey"

And I didn't even imagine it.

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 :)

Stories, by Josey

(as "written" on a scrap of paper and read aloud)

"There was a boy who didn't have eyes and he was on a dragon's back and he killed the dragon with his sword. The dragon couldn't eat him because the boy cut off his head. Then the boy took the dragon's head and put it in a big big big big big big big big garbage can. WE END."

(When asked, I was informed that the boy didn't have eyes because he was an alien. And how could he see where the dragon's head was so he could cut it off? "He just REMEMBERED where it was!")

"Once there were two boys who lived in a house all by themselves and they could play when they wanted and eat what they wanted and they even made supper by themselves. And then they decided to go to Grammie's house and on the way they saw another Grammie so they went there instead. WE END."

Not sure about the "WE END" part. Possibly a misinterpretation of me saying "the end" at the end of every story. He's still a genius though.

They'll hear about this when they're teenagers...

As we were driving this afternoon I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the boys smiling at each other and holding hands across the middle seat. Now I can tell them when they're 16 and 14 that they really did love each other once.