Thursday, January 7, 2010

Thursday

We're trying a new schedule for Judith - not that I expect her to really keep a schedule, but this is a major change, because we've cut out her afternoon nap. It feels way too early to be cutting it out, but it's been super hard to get her to go to sleep, both at naptime and at night (it takes about an hour each time). And naptime is further complicated because she transitioned from a morning nap to an afternoon nap (the girl that I drive carpool for had minimum days the week before Christmas, and we had to be picking her up in the middle of Judith's nap, so I just kept her up until after), which worked fine during the holidays, but now, if she doesn't get to sleep by 1:00, I have to wake her up to go drive the carpool. So we decided to see if it works. Today was the first day, and she didn't really seem to notice not napping, although she was a little crabby if things weren't going her way by about 6:30 p.m., and we put her down for the night at 7:15 (normal bedtime has been more like 8:15). She didn't complain at all about going down early, and she's not making the normal nighttime play-in-the-crib sounds. We'll see how it goes.

Here are anecdotes and pictures from the last two days:

We got a package from Grandma and Grandpa Sjoerdsma last night with "The Foot Book" and the stuffed "character" from the story. Judith was immediately interested in the stuffed toy - we've named him "Donald" and then wanted to sit down and read the book while holding him. Note that you can see the book's dust jacket on the floor in the background, because she really doesn't think they're necessary and the first thing she does to any jacketed book is pull it off :-). Today she's been carrying Donald around all day, saying "Dono" over and over.

This morning I was doing some baking and I crouched down to reach into the back of the cupboard to get out the whole wheat flour. It's the same cupboard that I used to pull chocolate chips out of for Judith (the chocolate chips are now all gone). She remembered and got very excited...she came running to me, saying "caca!, caca!" (that's how she says chocolate). She was so excited that I got out some other chocolate and gave her a piece: notice that she enjoyed it very much! (The other food on her face is apricot jelly because right before that she insisted on having bites of my toast.)

During our walk this afternoon, Judith decided to take both Tigre and Bear to ride with her in the stroller - it's very crowded that way! They were both sort of held in place on her lap (unless we were going down hill) by the afghan that was wrapped around her legs, so she had her hands free to play with them. She discovered that her hood was big enough to pull around in front of her face, and she had a great time playing peek-a-boo with Tigre and Bear by hiding behind the hood and then moving it away from her face. (Sorry, no picture here - I don't take the camera on my walks.)