The End of August

Whew!  August has been a busy and exhausting month!  Let me fill you in...

We started putting Whitt in his high-chair at mealtimes so he could feel like a part of the conversation.  He wasn't too impressed at first, but Adeline was excited for him to be sitting near her.

This boy is so strong.  He can already almost sit up by himself.  Crazy!

Annabel has been enjoying getting some time alone with Mommy while Whitt takes his morning nap and Adeline is at school.  She asks to "play a game with me!" about a hundred times a day.

We are so blessed that Jon gets to come home and eat lunch with us almost every day.  We look forward to it all morning and Annabel always asks him, "Why do you have to go back to work?"

Our church has a kickoff Sunday at the end of summer every year and they ask that we wear Razorback red.  We have way too much TCU Horned Frog pride for that!

That leads us to the week from you know where as far as Whitt's sleeping habits.  He'd been napping on a perfect schedule every day and sleeping 11 hours straight at night.  Then last Sunday he decided he wasn't ok with that and refused to nap at all.  He finally fell asleep on my chest late in the afternoon.

At the same time, he also decided he wanted to roll over in his rock & play.  Not cool.  He was about to slip out of the bottom, not to mention smother himself against the side.  What three month old can turn over from back to tummy, while swaddled and in the rock & play?

He was pretty proud of himself, though.  And who can be mad at this cute face?

Adeline colored this horse and said, "I'm going to take this picture to the pumpkin patch and show that man & tell him he needs to get a horse like this so I can ride it."  Hilarious!

I fixed her hair like this for school one morning.  She liked it, but she said, "my hair looks like a nest with a bird in it!"

Back to the sleeping situation...  I knew it was time to get him out of the rock & play and also out of the swaddle since he was turning over onto his face.  It was TORTURE!  He pretty much didn't nap all week long and I would still swaddle him and put him in the rock & play at night because I just had to get some sleep.  I started thinking that maybe he wasn't napping well because he was hungry.  I know, I know.  You go through everything you can think of when your baby isn't happy.  So, we started rice cereal just a tad bit early.  I know a lot of pediatricians these days recommend not starting any solids at all until six months if they're breastfed babies.  However, we started rice cereal at four months with our girls and Jon wanted to do the same with Whitt.  He thinks that maybe our girls are such good eaters because of something we did along the way, so he wants to do everything exactly the same.  Understandable!  So, anyway, Whitt has started eating rice cereal and he loves it!

After a terrible week of trying to get Whitt to sleep in his crib without being swaddled, I was about to pull out my hair and poor little Annabel had had no attention from me all week.  My sweet friend, Mollie, offered to spend the morning with her on Friday and took her and her daughter, Caroline to the pool.  So thankful for her!

 They also got to eat lunch and play dress-up at her house.

We got a bit of a cool front over the weekend, so we went to the park one evening.  Jon put Whitt in the swing.  Cracks me up!

So early on Friday morning, Whitt decided he'd wake up at 6am and try to flip himself out of the rock & play.  I knew then that we had to put that thing away and go to the crib full-time.  He slept all night in his crib for the first time on Friday night.  We celebrated with a crib party Saturday morning!

Jon and Annabel did a little bit of grocery shopping over the weekend.  Annabel likes to play with the stuff in his truck when she rides in it.

I got tired of a cluttered fridge, so we made this to solve that problem.  The girls love it.

Saturday night we got a newlywed couple to keep all three of our kids and we went to a Natural's game with our friends.  It was so much fun!  And the kids and the sitters did great!

And then in the middle of the night on Saturday I woke up to all this racket in Whitt's room.  I went in and he'd turned himself completely around in the bed and was at the opposite end of the crib.  He'd also broken out of the swaddle (I was still swaddling him at night).  So, that had to be the end of the swaddle, too.  Wow!  I didn't break my girls of the swaddle until 5 months, but he's showing me all the time that he's a boy and a whole lot stronger than they were.

So now, I think he's finally gotten it down.  I had to resort to the crying out method, which I hate, but nothing else was working, and trust me, I tried EVERYTHING.  So now, I put him in bed for naps and at night and he cries for maybe five minutes, then he's out.  He's still waking up earlier than normal or once during the night now as he adjusts to not being swaddled, but I expect it to get better every day.  I'm hopeful that he'll be back to sleeping a full, uninterrupted eleven hours soon.

My little man before church on Sunday.

And we went to the lake with friends Sunday afternoon.  I told Adeline to get ready for the lake and she came in like this.  Hah!  Tinkerbell high heels!

So the last week of August was absolutely exhausting, thanks to Whitt, but now I'm glad we did the crib and the swaddle all at once and now we're past that!  Hallelujah!