A Sunday Outing

1:40 PM. Decide to go for an outing due to a)restlessness, b)weather that is gorgeous but too cool for our original plan of a beach trip, and c)to wear out the toddler who is rattling the bars of his crib after a notnap. Choose a new park that we've never been to together and don't know exactly where it is.

2:00 PM. Everyone who wears such things has diapers and shoes, the diaper bag has full water bottles and emergency Cheerios, and Lady Infant is buckled into her bucket. Persuade Mr. Husband to take both kids to the car so I can sneak a snack and not share it with Sir Toddler before I lock up.

2:10 PM. Comment on the odd route weaving through back roads that Siri has chosen.

2:40 PM. Comment that we could have taken more familiar main roads in the same amount of time, and how strange that this park is accessible by such small neighborhood roads. This is done over the background noise of Lady Infant fussing and Sir Toddler repeatedly requesting that we get out of the car and go for a walk.

2:43 PM. Siri is directing us to park on a neighborhood street and walk through someone's backyard to access a distant border of this park. WHAT. Reference Google Maps on Mr. Husband's phone, since the navigation has sucked my phone's battery dry.

2:50 PM. Finally pull up to the parking lot of the park and discover that the parking fee is per person, rather than per car. Well, we've come this far...at least the kids are free.

2:52 PM. Discover the source of Lady Infant's distress: a diaper bomb that has ruined her adorable outfit. An awkward diaper change in the front passenger seat ensues.* The spare outfit is a little skimpy for the weather, but at least it's the correct size. This time.

2:53 PM. Briefly debate the merits of the double stroller versus making the toddler walk. The notnap that preceded this trip makes the decision for us, even though it means stopping to pick up every stick and leaf we came across.

(I've been told that babies should be worn high and tight, but please show me a structured (buckles please!) baby carrier that can be worn so by a 5'2" mother whose six-month-old is in the 70th percentile for length. She didn't get it from me.)

Sir Toddler was rewarded by one of his favorite sights, "Giant fan!"

The view wasn't too bad.

Not pictured: the mystery dead fish thing Mr. Husband found on the shore and insisted on investigating and photographing while Sir Toddler poked it with a stick. Gross. Lady Infant and I stood upwind of it and averted our eyes.

Success: Sir Toddler is tuckered out!

 3:55 PM. Buckle everyone back into the chariot, drive home, and send Mr. Husband around the corner on an urgent errand while I make dinner.

Post-hiking relaxation in a glass.

*Although it is always awful trying to do diaper changes in the front passenger seat (our compact sedan has few options now that the backseat is taken up entirely by car seats), at least it wasn't as bad as an ill-fated grocery trip wherein Lady Infant's diaper and outfit were changed into a completely outgrown long-sleeve onesie (on an 80 degree day) while Sir Toddler cried a river in the back seat about wanting to ride in the police car grocery cart. Naturally, once he was loaded into said grocery cart and Lady Infant strapped to my torso, he spotted the taxi grocery cart. There is nothing quite so glorious as an unaccompanied trip to the grocery store.

7 QT...because why not?

Lady Infant is napping, and Sir Toddler is enclosed in his crib for his lately inconsistent "nap" time, so here we are with my first ever link-up with This Ain't the Lyceum. Here are a few thoughts  kicking around here these days.

1. I made fancy shmancy oatmeal.

There's a (boring) story behind this: I've been trying to shake up breakfast a little bit since I've gotten really sick of cold cereal and the sugar crash that comes with it. Although my recipe of choice lately has been just salt+pepper+butter+oatmeal (bulletproof?), I did really fancy it up after I tried a recipe that called for 8 oz. of ricotta. Naturally, the grocery store only had 32 oz. containers, so I had to use up quite a bit of extra in the four seconds it takes for ricotta to go bad after it's opened. I made a (not pictured because we gobbled it up) ricotta cheesecake from The Italian Slow Cooker, and still had a bit left, so I decided to add it with some leftover lemon juice and sugar to fancy up some steel-cut oats. It was like having ricotta cheesecake with oatmeal, which was much tastier than it sounds. Try it!

2. It's August? How is that possible? Maybe because we had such a long wait for nice weather in New England, this summer has flown by, and I feel like my inability to get out the door before lunchtime with both kids has meant that we've barely taken the time to enjoy it. I'm trying to get over my disgust with our shared backyard-with-no-enclosure-full-of-weeds-and-anthills and the pointlessness of trying to improve rental land that is also a minefield of dog feces.

The rope is my attempt at a barrier to keep him out of several stinky messes. Seriously, what is wrong with people?

3. Lately, if I leave the two littles alone for a few minutes, I've been walking into scenes like this:

It warms my heart to see their relationship as siblings budding.

4. When do toddlers drop their naps? I'm hoping we have a few more months of napping, but my inability to get us out in the morning plus some probing for potty readiness means that Sir Toddler doesn't always get out the wiggles. We've been trying to get out in the morning here and there to help him along. 

He's learning how to walk with me instead of riding in the stroller, which helps wear him out even faster.

5. Lady Infant is finally starting some solids. She continues to earn her nickname of Queen Baby, as her Majesty won't sit in the high chair for very long without fussing, and showed very little interest in solid food at all until I whipped this out and stuffed it with chunks of cooked sweet potato:

She does have eyes. We're just not ready to plaster the internet with public pictures of our kids' faces.

I know there are easier-to-clean feeders out there, but someone gave us this one for Sir Toddler as a baby, and since he cried every time I tried to give it to him, it was just laying around unused.

6. Does anybody else hate the word "chunks"? And all other related words (chunk, chunky, etc.)? I'm stretching this, I know. #1 is so long, though!

7. If I've heard it once, I've heard it many times that it's pointless to force potty training on a kid who isn't ready. The thought of the whole process gives me nightmares because I haven't done it before and I'm not eager to spend so much time scrubbing poop and pee out of all of the upholstered purchases in the house. However, we spent two mornings now where Sir Toddler played peacefully sans pants and diaper for an hour, asked to put his diaper on, and then promptly soiled it. So I'd say we're halfway there.

Unrelated, I know. But how lucky are we to be walking distance from a construction site?

How to Sleep Train Your Dragon

As I might have whined about mentioned in my previous blog post, we've been having some trouble getting Lady Infant to sleep more than three hours together at night. It started about three weeks ago and was starting to really put a strain on our sanity. You'd think that after successfully sleep and nap training one child, we'd feel like we had some idea of what to do, but every child really is different. Sir Toddler had night feedings until he was nine months old, but he didn't regress for long periods of time like this little lady has. We were also able to get him to sleep through the night by replacing the last feeding with a sippy cup of water, because he was so much older.  Between the exhaustion and the stubbornness of Queen Baby, I felt like a new mom all over again. Humble pie be ours.

After I finally admitted to myself that I was out of ideas, I reached out to our beloved pediatrician via our online medical records service and both she and the RN in the office told us to go ahead and eliminate night feedings, and use the Ferber method. I tend to shy away from strict "methods" in parenting, but I do know from my limited experience how important consistency is, plus we'd used some version of Ferber with Sir Toddler without permanently scarring him (as far as I can tell).  So we decided to let Lady Infant cry herself back to sleep at night, checking on her every 10-15 minutes.

I hope Roger Goodell doesn't find out about our improperly inflated air mattress.

Since she was waking up not fussing, but screaming her head off most nights, we made the crazy insane decision to sleep on an air mattress in our living room. It was kind of like a weird sleepover. We set up white noise in her room, turned on a fan in ours, plugged in the baby monitor, and braced ourselves after her 10 PM feeding for a long night. Our plan, if she woke and cried, was to switch off the baby monitor, set a timer for 10 minutes, and then switch it back on after it went off to see if she was still crying.

The long night...wasn't. Mr. Husband nobly checked on her once and soothed her after her first ten minutes of crying, and then she was asleep by the time the second timer went off. We did another night in the living room and didn't have to go back up at all, so we decided to take the bold step of moving back into our own bed. It became apparent to us, however, that Lady Infant is quite aware that her roommates include The Food (me) and The Fun One (Mr. Husband), so we MacGyvered a little privacy screen.

Lady Infant still likes to wake up and squawk in the middle of the night, but instead of screaming her head off for hours, she fusses for a few minutes and puts herself back to sleep. Mr. Husband and I are eagerly anticipating the day these wakings stop so that we can move her into Sir Toddler's room, but for now we're sleeping better and everyone is happier.

How do you deal with sleeping woes?