Sleeping Success!

Well, it seems I have been less than stellar about keeping up the blog every week. I do apologize if you are left wanting more of these little men...I can't blame you. They are pretty awesome. Even more awesome, or at least also awesome, is Aaron's ability to put himself to sleep lately. Dave put Aaron to bed one night when I was out at a class. He fed Aaron a bottle, but when the bottle was gone, Aaron was still awake. Not knowing what else to do, Dave just put Aaron in the crib. Aaron started to cry, but Dave just rubbed his little tummy, and Aaron stuck his thumb in his mouth and fell asleep. Since then, I've been putting Aaron to bed while he's still awake, and he's been putting himself to sleep in the crib.

Now, this is not the first time we tried this, but it's the first time it's actually worked. Before, Aaron would cry and just get more and more upset, but it seems now that he's ready to sleep in the crib. At night he gets a story, sometimes in bed with Mudgie and sometimes in the chair in his room. Then I nurse him and sing him his bedtime song, but I make sure to put him in the crib before he really starts to fall asleep. Then I rub his belly and cover him with a blanket (yes, I let him sleep with a blanket) while he sucks his thumb and paws at his lovey. Then I tell him goodnight and leave the room. And it works! We are still working out the kinks of getting him back into the crib in the middle of the night, but even that is getting better (although worse wasn't an option here).

The biggest change in Aaron's sleep, however, has been naps. He is now taking 2 good naps every day. He'll go down for his first nap around 9:30, and that will usually last about 1.5 hours. He'll take his afternoon nap sometime between 1 and 2, and that will last 1-1.5 hours. I don't know what happened to my baby, but I like it!

Mudgie is the same happy, though opinionated, toddler he's always been. I've started taking a cake decorating class, and this is like a goldmine for Mudgie. I made a cake last Saturday night, and even though the cake was sitting on the counter since then, he didn't notice it until after my class on Monday night, when I decorated it with brightly colored frosting. On Tuesday morning he went into the kitchen and said, "[Gasp] Mommy made a birthday cake!" I asked him if he wanted to see the top, and when I took the cake off the counter to show him he gasped again. I asked him if he knew what it was, and he whispered, "fire truck." The he said, "We can eat some after dinner?" However, when he did finally get a piece after dinner, he was very confused why it was nobody's birthday. There were no candles and no singing Happy Birthday, which I think he was a little dissapointed about, but he ate the cake all the same!