A screamer

The last two days were glorious in terms of Leif care and maintenance. He was, for those two days, the easiest-to-nap baby ever. But today was more like this:

I think Leif is the only baby in Stockholm who doesn't nap in the stroller. (Well, he does sometimes, but not reliably, and usually not until we've reached our block on our way home.) Lucky for us, though, his napping has become fairly reliable and if we pay close attention, we can put him in his bassinet at just the right time for him to ease off into sleep.

We've changed Augie's school schedule: instead of four regular-length days, he's doing five shorter days. Today was his first short day (we pick him up at 1:45), and it doesn't seem to have gone all that well. Augie loves being at school and doesn't always like to leave - he especially doesn't want to be the first of his friends to go! One of his teachers the other day was telling me that he's speaking more and more Swedish at school and he seems to understand everything they say to him; we feel so lucky that we are able to provide him an opportunity to speak another language at such an early age, and to get his brain wired for foreign language acquisition in the future.

Oh, and ppparently at lunch today, after Augie finished his three servings of the main course (something called Kassler Marrakesh) and everyone was washing up, he went back to the serving table and picked up the serving bowl of cottage cheese, took it back to his seat, and started eating right out of it! He would have eaten the whole thing if one of the teachers hadn't stopped him. He is his father's son.

Augie now does most of his peeing in the potty or the big toilet; he does NOT like to wear a diaper, at least when he's with us. He normally wears either undies or just his pants (or nothing at all), and he's quite good at pulling down his pants and getting to the potty. Lucky for us, he's starting sitting, too, so there's rarely a mess. He's not so good at school, probably because using the potty there means having to stop playing with his friends and go to a different room (though the caregivers are great with supporting him). We've had some major meltdowns at bedtime, as he DOES NOT want to wear a diaper to bed! I guess he figures that now that he knows how to pee in the potty, he doesn't need a diaper at night. He fights so hard, but we really don't feel he's ready to even try the night without a diaper (especially since he usually ends up drinking so much bathwater) because he usually wakes up with very full pee diaper. We feel so terrible, holding him down and forcing a diaper on him, while he screams "no diaper!" and turns red and fights with all his being. It's only by telling him that it's for poop when he wakes up that we're able to get it on. We've thought about preparing the bed and letting him try to go without a diaper, so that he starts to see how tough it is to wake up all night to go to his potty, but he just seems so far from being night-time competent.