It's Back...

It's laughable how the second time in Edward's 14 months of life he begins to sleep through the night to only be rudely awakened by his teething, causing mad late night havoc for us all. The restless nights and sometimes even hourly wakings are so hard to deal with. To add insult to injury, he's still up at 6:30 am without fail. As exhausted as I am it is my responsibility to be up with him and fulfill my duties to my young man. Although I don't always do it with a smile I am happy to oblige. He's now on the "I want the pacifier all day" kick, and cries until he gets it (he used to only use it during nap and bedtimes). We try to side track him with toys or books, but if he cries hard enough we give in.  We wonder how much of that is because of teething and how much of it is a power struggle.  So we stress over the dumb pacifier fight. He's also been a healthy eater but now seemingly picky, forgoing food he once loved for ice cubes and peanut butter and crackers. I've been told that teething takes about 2 years, so we have 9 more months.

I'm also going through a phase of my own. Maybe it's lack of sleep or a case of the baby blues, but where did my baby go? There are times when my independent toddler wants to be a big boy and then he "reverts" to being a baby. How do I balance this? How much do I give in to the baby's needs? Am I "spoiling" him by giving in? I know each child is different as is each scenario but what about consistency? I don't want to look back and wish I did it differently, after all I'm doing everything my parents didn't, right? Being in this for over a year, I thought I got this parenthood stuff down, but each phase throws me another curve ball and has me questioning everything I do all the time. It's so unrelenting and stressful. As I'm typing I'm thinking to myself, "am I taking parenting to seriously" could I really be over thinking it all? I bet I'll come back here a few years from now with an answer. Until then I'll ponder...

I really thought it would get easier as he got older and it isn't. So I find myself out of the house more often and earlier. We are always at the playground and used to get there after lunch but one early morning, when neither of us could take each other anymore, the playground was our mutually agreed upon choice for our peace treaty.  Although it was 8:30am and we were the first to arrive, it wasn't long before it was filled with other boys his age. I couldn't believe it, I'd never seen so many boys at the playground before. I asked the caretakers and mothers if this was common and they all agreed. So now we join the other boys bright and early on the playground for his morning exercise and where I finish my tea.

Maybe I should take
the advice of my mug

So readers, send me some good vibes to help us through this crazy stage and share your helpful tips of how to successfully plough through.

Love Lots,
Mommy SF

We took the crib down on Monday, which was bittersweet; bitter because we spent a lot for the crib and sweet that my baby is growing leaps and bounds. Honestly, this was a reality coming at us full steam over 3 months ago, we just tried avoiding it. Up until then our son loved the crib but once we began struggling to get him in it and fighting with him to stay, we knew the day had come and he was ready to transition out. But the advice from other moms was to keep him in the crib until he could climb out. The horror stories about their babes getting out of bed in the middle of the night to crawl into bed with them freaked me out enough to put up with the fight. But the joke was on me because when he would wake at nights screaming and not willing to go back down, for my own sanity, I caved in and got him back to sleep by snuggling in bed with him. Then the epiphany happened; what's good for one family isn't good for all.  So we packed up the crib and discovered more play space and now almost a week into it are sleeping through the night, that is until last night when he started teething again, humph...

Since we live in a 2 bedroom and have my parents stay with us often, an extra bed was needed, so we went on the search of something functional but yet compact. Eureka, we found the Ikea Hemnes daybed (trundle) that has an awesome amount of storage and meets our sleeping needs to a "t". It's an affordable investment and equally a beautiful piece. We even bought two Ikea foam mattresses that stack and are light weight. Now that he's sleeping in the twin, we bring the second mattress on the ground in case he rolls out. I know you're thinking that's what bed rails are for, but I just couldn't bring myself to pay for what pillows, blankets and the spare mattress can do.

Now about the bitter part, we made the investment in this amazing Stokke Sleepi Crib system. It's a crib, toddler bed, junior bed and even can be broken down into two chairs. But what we couldn't imagine was that our little guy would want to be out of his jail cell so soon. We even tried to coerce him in just playing in the junior bed, yeah right! My kid is smarter than me. So now that our baby is sleeping in a big boy bed that isn't the "convertible" crib I feel "had". Maybe the excitement of having a luxury all-in-one was to good to be true after all. But the truth is, this bed was really a great buy, its function and design as a crib really achieved so much of what we needed in our small space. (Here's me blogging about it).  I'm just sad to not see it morph into its other stages.

Tell me about your transitioning stories. Are you ready to move your babe into the big bed or are you holding out? Have some funny stories to share? Would love to hear about them.

Love Lots,
Mommy SF