Regression should not be allowed. I'm of the mindset that once a child has mastered a certain skill, then that skill should be a permanent addition to her lifestyle. Especially if said skill has been present for a week or more. Gretchen, I'm looking at you. You are perfectly capable of sleeping all the way from when I put you down at night to when it's time to wake up the next morning. I accept the need for a couple of pacifier reinsertion maneuvers, but that's it. You don't need to be rocked or fed in the middle of the night anymore. We had some beautiful weeks a while ago where you did fine every night, but then you thought maybe you needed to spice life up again. You would be mistaken. Sleeping through the night is possible. Night weaning has happened. If you don't believe me, read my blog. You actually proved my point by having a couple wonderful nights again this week. Keep it up.
Bryan sent me a text that I'd like to share with you: I've created a monster. I started letting Olivia pick the animals while we sang "Old McDonald." She eventually got to "koala." Not knowing what sound a koala makes, I took the lazy way out and said, "with a koala here and a koala there..." This introduced a revolutionary concept: if the word doesn't have an associated sound it makes, you just sing the word again. We've had "pottys here" and "raisins there"... They aren't even all objects anymore. The last one was "a be right back here and a be right back there." It's been a half hour.
The other day I had the car to myself, which meant I had sole control of the CD player. I could listen to whatever I wanted. Amazing. My options were so varied, but the only thing I could think of was "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall..."
Olivia has a performance mode. Her Uncle Brad came to visit briefly, and she stood next to the computer and gave him a recital. As songs came on Pandora, she sang every single one without moving from her spot unless the lyrics told her to. Along the same lines, her word association is pretty spectacular. She listens to conversations until she hears something she can identify, and then she jumps in with a (sometimes relevant) comment about whatever it was.
Last week I was going to write about Olivia's newly perfected tantrums, but this week they were practically non-existent. She was falling apart at every little thing. -- Mommy is going to say the prayer, too? Terrible. It's time for lunch? End of the world. Gretchen is touching something? How does everyone else not notice these atrocities? Mom said to put on a shirt? I can't take this anymore, I'm going to bed. -- Happily, she's been less prone to collapsing in fits of crying this week.
We've entered into hardcore potty training. Olivia has been half potty trained for probably nine months now, but she'd recently fallen off the wagon and regressed back to zero potty training. This, of course, caused her rash to come back and we decided it was finally time to force the issue. On Monday we stuck her in underwear and let the
Pictures:
Bryan wanted to get a picture of Olivia picking the marshmallows out of her Lucky Charms and label it "Lucky Charms: Improving dexterity since 1964."
There's a story behind this:
Gretchen being happy:
Olivia is a fabulous photographer. I told her to try to take a picture of Gretchen:
Are you going to tell us the story behind the stuff on your head?
ReplyDeleteOh, yes. We had Bryan's coworker and his girlfriend over to play cards, and ended up playing a game that we call "The game with no rules," which is a card game that has constantly updating rules that are created by whoever wins each hand. When Gina won, she decided that she was going to make a hat out of toilet paper for the next person who won, which happened to be me.
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