Here you go, Mom!

Going back to daycare sure does wear a girl out!

300th post, and milestones update

This post marks my 300th post! I have quite a lot to say, huh? :)

I realized that I haven't updated lately with Raegan's milestones, so I figured I should do that while I'm thinking of it.

More and more every day it seems like Raegan is more of a little girl and less of a baby. Weekly, and sometimes even daily, she is doing new things. I'm always in awe of how very smart she is. I know every parent thinks that their child is so smart, but I don't think it's just me being her mom. She can count to ten, you guys! TEN. For the longest time, she would start at 2 and count to 10, but this week she's started counting with the number one. Sometimes she will point at objects and count, but she doesn't always use one number for one object, and when she's doing that she usually trails off around five or six. I love the way she says five, with a "sh" sound on the end instead of a "v". Raegan is also starting to use color words, although she's not correctly naming any colors yet. She mostly says that things are blue or yellow. She has an Elmo alphabet book that she has pretty much memorized, and in certain parts of the book she can tell you what letter is coming next. As soon as you start reading the page that says "Iguana starts with I" she will immediately say J. She points to words and letters and calls them all E. :) These are all awesome skills that I look for in the 3 year olds I teach, so I'm pretty pumped that she's starting to show some literacy skills before the age of 2. She still loves to read, and we start off every day with book after book after book. :)

Raegan's nervousness about going to the pool has pretty much disappeared. She's still not a fan of deep water where she can't touch, but she loves going to the baby pool! One of her recent new words is "swimsuit." She's also so fearless when it comes to climbing and playing at the park. She loves the slides and the climbing structures. She had no fear of going through any of the play places at Silver Dollar City. I'm glad that she doesn't have the paralyzing fear of heights that I did as a child.

Her vocabulary is expanding daily. She's starting to use three word sentences/phrases more frequently. She knows the names for about every animal under the sun, and can do the noises for just as many. :) One of Raegan's favorite things to say right now is "What's that?" If we go somewhere new, she immediately asks about our new surroundings and wants to figure everything out. When we say prayers before bed, she has suggestions for what we should pray about now, usually involving saying thank you for all of her friends from daycare. She has three in particular that she names off multiple times.

Hopefully this weekend we're going to break out the toddler bed and start transitioning her to that. She tends to have a hard time sleeping in new beds (see: blogs about our vacation!) so we're starting now with the hopes that she'll be settled in by the time I go back to work and not too tired in the mornings. She still wants to sit on the potty before bath, and randomly throughout the day, but she's not really going in it yet. She will tell you the instant she is wet or poopy (she calls it all "poopy") but she's not quite there yet in letting us know beforehand. I kind of want to get the bed transition taken care of before we start focusing on potty training more intensely.

I can't believe that Raegan is almost two! It seems like just yesterday she was my brand new baby.

Zonked!

This is what nap looks like after a busy morning!

Update

What a busy week it has been! It's that time of year when work is definitely a little overwhelming as we gear up for parent teacher conferences. I haven't had very much energy left for blogging by the time the night is over. Also, I've been battling a headache since Wednesday (I think due to all the time I'm spending in front of the computer at work) so I've basically just been vegging out and going to bed semi-early.

Raegan has taken a few more steps since Monday, but she's a smart girl and very aware that crawling gets her where she wants to be a lot faster still. There have been several times that she has let go of what she's been holding onto, taken a step or two, then dropped down sloooowly to the ground to take off crawling. When she gets in a couple steps she starts giggling like crazy, like she's saying, "Holy crap, holy crap, I'm doing this." She's getting a lot better at standing on her own, because I see her standing up against furniture without holding onto it, and standing alone for a couple seconds without dropping.

Raegan has gotten into a bad habit of waking up around 4:00 every morning this week. She's none too pleased when I change her diaper and put her back in her crib, but we're not going backwards to nursing in the middle of the night again. Hopefully she'll break this soon and we can go back to full nights of sleep.

Today while her and I were coming home from the store I had to pull over because she had pulled one arm completely out of her carseat strap. I put her all back together then got back in and took off. Raegan assumed I was letting her out, and she was none too pleased with me. She would say, "Mama" then growl (and not her growl to be funny - her angry growl!) She was making it pretty clear what she thought of me! lol


Zane is doing a great job of getting himself up and moving every morning before school. He doesn't poke around hardly at all anymore, which is good, because now that I have to get myself and Raegan both ready I don't have time to prod him anymore. I guess he makes up for it by poking around when it comes time to do his homework after school! And he may not be a fan of practicing his trumpet, but he sure is getting really good at it. Next month we start doing fundraisers for his high school field trip to Disney World (assuming he stays in band that long). The director said the trip is very pricey and even 6th graders should think about participating in fundraisers, so we'll be selling cookie dough, etc. next month.

I have only a few pictures to share. See above where I talk about being so busy. :)

Did I mention that Raegan is a big girl facing forward now?

She loves watermelon!

My belly!

If we leave water in Raegan's water table, Radar will drink out of it. (The picture is a little fuzzy because Luke had to take it through the screen window. Radar runs off if you open the back door like it's this big awful thing he's doing!)

Our week

Picture-less update on the kids:

Zane:
Zane is doing really well in middle school so far. We were kind of worried because of his huge lack of organizational skills, but he seems to be doing well so far. He's only had one late assignment in the last three weeks, which is excellent for him. I took a peek at his grades online and as of yesterday he has all A's! He's never had a problem with understanding the material, it's just remembering to get everything done and turned in.

Soccer practices started this evening. We're doing something new this season since Zane is too old for YMCA sports. He's going to play on a middle school (6th, 7th and 8th combined) team through Parks and Rec. Luke said there's only a couple other 6th graders on the team, but I figure that will be good for Zane. Apparently there was a kid at the skills assessment last week who was over 6 foot tall. How do kids get to be that tall when they're in middle school? Jeez.

Zane has finally decided he wants a haircut. All I can say is thank the good Lord Almighty. He needed one about 2 months ago. :)

Raegan:
Raegan has slept through the night for almost two weeks now. She usually wakes up between 5:30 and 6:30 every morning. If it's closer to 5:30 I put her back down after she nurses and get her up around 7:00 to get dressed and walk out the door. I don't know if she was just really tired from her birthday party this weekend or if she's really playing hard at child care, but she's been in bed before 8:00 every night this week.

I'm slowly starting the weaning process. I've taken out the nursing in the late afternoon after we get home by giving her another snack as soon as we walk in the door. Today she ate a 4 ounce container of strawberry yogurt in one setting. And still ate a good supper. Next week I'm going to have Angela stop one of her bottles during the day. Slow and steady....

Raegan is a climbing machine! Today she climbed up on top of her Little Mermaid push toy and proceeded to climb up onto the couch. It seems to me like she can probably take off walking any time she chooses to. I think she's still just a little nervous about letting go. :)

We've been enjoying the much nicer weather. Last night we put the water table out on the deck and played in it for awhile. Tonight we went on a long walk. I hope that fall is here to stay! I can't wait to take the kids to the pumpkin patch next month! Fall is seriously my favorite season.

Well, that's about all in our neck of the woods for now.

Big girl!

New things from Raegan:

-She is REALLY imitating a lot of what we say. Luke said he was asking her on the changing table is she wanted to go night night and she said, "Ni-ni". When we read her animal book I make pig noises when we get to the pig and she always makes a growling noise back. (Which is also the same noise for the bear and lion, lol).

-Raegan has started pushing the kitchen chairs around this week. I think she'll really like her birthday present. It's going to be really hard to wait two more weeks to give it to her!

-She's also been putting herself down to sleep at night, with only 5-10 minutes of fussing or crying in her crib. She only hardcore cries for a minute or two, then just generally whines until she falls asleep. And we are consistently down to her only waking up one time at night, and last night she didn't wake up until 5:30 a.m.

-Raegan ate yogurt (and LOVED it) with no reaction. So far so good on any lactose intolerance, although I've read that people who are lactose intolerant can still handle yogurt. At least we know she's not allergic because she didn't break out in hives or go into anaphylactic shock. That's always a good thing, right?

Night weaning

Raegan is slooooooowly getting better at making it through the night without waking up. Everything I've read says that there is physical reason for her to need to eat several times a night, and the speed at which she would fall back asleep while nursing made me think that she just liked the habit of nursing to sleep. She was getting back to the point of waking up 2 or 3 times a night, which at 11 months old is just not neccessary, so I decided it was time to start weaning out the night nursings. Luke's been going to bed kind of late lately, so he rocks her back to sleep the first time she wakes up (10:30 or 11:00). When I wouldn't feed her and would only rock her the first few nights I got up with her, she FLIPPED out. Over the last week or so it's been getting better. I've found that giving Raegan a couple drinks from her water cup helps a lot. As long as it's at least 5:00, I'll go ahead and nurse her, and after doing so at 6:30 this morning she went right back to sleep. I got to see a very pretty sunrise this morning though, so that was kind of nice.

Now we just have to work on her not throwing a fit before she takes a nap. :S

Stinker!

I am desperately trying to get Raegan into a schedule before I go back to work. I keep a schedule now in that we always eat meals around the same times, and we start the getting ready for bed process about 7:30 every evening. Lately it's been a huge struggle to get Raegan to fall asleep and I think it may be because sometimes she takes a later afternoon nap, so she's not tired by the time we put her in her crib between 8:00 and 8:30. Plus, I love my sleep, so if she wants to sleep in in the morning, I let her. Not going to be an option in exactly two weeks. :( So today I cut off Raegan's second nap at 4:00. Not early enough, because she was still pretty wide eyed by 8:30 p.m. So tomorrow I'll try 3:30 and see what happens. We did the usual: bath, nurse, brush teeth, book, rock and sing. Then I put her in her crib and left the room. Sometimes she starts wailing because she doesn't like to be left alone, and sometimes she just stands up in her crib. I figured, if she's quiet and calm, she'll eventually sit down and go to sleep, right?

Ha! Actually, that's not a complete scoff, because she did eventually go to sleep. But first we had to take care of this little problem:



Typically, Raegan goes to the other end of her crib and stands there yelling until someone comes in. I think maybe because Luke was mowing she decided to go check it out. It was hilarious to see it from the outside, because you could see the blind in her window going back and forth. So I picked her up and rocked her in the living room for a minute and Luke lowered the mattress all the way down (which we needed to do anyways now that she can pull up in her crib). I put Raegan back in bed and after 10 minutes of complete silence, I peek my head in just a bit to find her standing in the same spot still moving the blind. Little stinker! At this point, I moved the crib away from the window about a foot. About 20 seconds after I left the room she let out a scream, which I took to mean that she found out she couldn't play with the blind anymore.

She must have contented herself with her Cookie Monster or blankie, because she was quiet for another 10 minutes or so, then started slowly escalating in her "I need attention" cry, that's not actually a cry at all. At one point she started screaming, so I went in, laid her back down and patted her. I left after a minute, which as always Raegan was not pleased about, but she didn't scream for more than a minute. She eventually fell asleep completely on her own (which is a very rare thing these days), but probably not until close to 10:00. We have two weeks though, so hopefully through some trial and error we can get this figured out. My goal for tomorrow is to get her up around 8:00. Which means I need to go to bed! lol Good night all!

More on sleep

So if you recall from my previous post, we (i.e. mostly me at the moment, due to Luke working on the deck) are working on getting Raegan to start self soothing and putting herself to sleep at night. I learned in the infant development class I took at K-State that you are basically there to ask how high when your newborn says jump. But once they are able to understand object permanence (that something can be gone and still exist) you can start to let them cry a little bit. Raegan is demonstrating some very obvious object permanence. Now when we hide something under a blanket or behind us, she goes after it whereas before she would be instantly distracted. This coincided beautifully with the beginning of summer, which means that if she kept me up a lot for a few nights I could always nap during the afternoon.

I started Monday, and it was rough. Tuesday was a little better. And last night, we hit the jackpot, with maybe 5 minutes of crying/fussing, then sleep. And she slept from 8:30-2:30. Apparently, "sleeping through the night" for an infant is considered to be 5 hours in a row, so we're golden. For a couple weeks now she's been waking up only twice in the night, and last night was only once.

Everything I read said have a consistent bedtime routine, which was always hard before with classes and homework and bell choir. Now, we start about 7:45 - bath, books, nurse, cuddle. Then she gives everyone kisses goodnight (or gets them if she's not in the kissing mood), then it's off to bed. I probably shouldn't be bragging about how well last night went - I'm probably jinxing tonight. But I just have to say hallelujah, praise Jesus. As much as I loved rocking Raegan to sleep every night, I was so worried that I would have a 2 or 3 year old that had to be rocked and patted to sleep. Hopefully this will continue to go well.

Nap this afternoon went really well also. I snuggled her up for a couple minutes, then put her in her crib, gave her Cookie Monster, and left. After 3 minutes or so of fussing (not even crying) she was out like a light. And is still out an hour and fifteen minutes later. I'm hopeful..... :)

New sleep habits coming up!

Well, Raegan is on a pretty regular nap schedule, unless something we are doing throws her off because we're not at home. She typically sleeps until about 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning, then takes her first nap around 11:30. How long the first nap is depends on how long the second nap will be and when she will take it. Anymore, on the weekends she's been taking about an hour and a half for the first nap, then going down for the second one around 4:00, and that one lasts an hour to an hour and a half. Even not waking up until 5:30 p.m., she's typically down for the night by 9:00 at the latest.

Putting her down for nap is hardly ever a struggle, but putting her down for the night can be. Now that I have the opportunity to nap in the afternoon if I need to, we are implementing NO MORE SWING at night. So while we get into that habit, I'm still letting Raegan come into bed at night, but once we get her sleeping for long stretches without the swinging motion, we will implement NO MORE MOMMY/DADDY BED. I do love waking up to her in the morning, because she pats my face and talks to me and it's just too sweet. But Raegan is such a stinkin' bed hog. I don't know how someone who is barely over two feet tall can take up so much room?!?! And this morning she was scooching backwards in her sleep, effectively taking up the ENTIRE! bed. Which now when I think about it, it's funny, but at 6:00 a.m. it was not. :)

Ah, sleep. The Holy Grail of being the parent to an infant or toddler.

Sleep, school, and other Monday news

Things are NOT good when Raegan gets too tired. Which I think she was tonight. The more tired she gets, the more she FIGHTS sleep. She was asleep at 7:30, and when we tried to transfer her to her crib she woke up. And then alternated fussing and hollering for over an hour. She's asleep now, but yeesh!

She definitely is clapping! She was doing it again tonight, and actually making some real clapping noises too. And as always, Raegan is insanely pleased with herself when she masters something new.

Zane finished his digital fourth quarter book report. If you want to check it out this link *should* take you there. It took a lot of cattle prodding on our part (heh), but I think he did a pretty good job. We are the meanest parents ever for maaaaaaaking him do it though. Oh, and don't make comments on his page, por favor. :) If you ever wanted to know ever tiny detail about the first Percy Jackson book, this is the book report to read. Luke finally had to say to him, "This is what 'summarize' means...." lol