Sleeping beauties

We all napped this afternoon, me with Leif and James squeezed in with August in his tiny bed. 

Augie shots

We are slowly, slowly adjusting to European time. After the nearly sleepless flight home, we've spent hours awake each night as the kids adjust to being back here. Last night was the first night that we haven't had any major overnight wake-ups (of course Leif woke a bunch of times but quickly went back to sleep after nursing or patting). We're drained.

Which is unfortunate, because we're also trying to buy a car, pick a new preschool (more on that another day), pack our things, buy all the furniture we need for the new place, get car and home insurance, etc. Oh, and move. So I probably don't have to tell you that posting on the blog falls pretty low on the priority list right now. I'd like to promise you more regular posts, but I don't see that happening until we get settled in the new place. I'll do better, though.

But, a few recent pics. This is August after I woke him up at 9:30am on Saturday to try to get him back into a normal rhythm:

I love him in primary colors. He looks great in red.

You look like a happy mama

I was walking home from the furniture store with Leif this morning when a kind-looking, middle-aged man walking towards us said something in Swedish. "Jag pratar inte svenska!" (I don't speak Swedish) I replied as he passed by, and he said, in English, "You look like a happy mama. That makes me happy!" I kept walking, he kept walking, and the encounter was over.

My first thought was, How un-Swedish of him to say something (kind!) to a stranger! My second thought was, Well, yeah! He's right. At the exact moment he said that to me I was fantasizing about couches (we bought one!), but I am, in fact, very contented with my life as a mama. With my babies. With these boys who fill my days and nights with wonder and joy, poop and snot, contended sighs and tiny voices.

And it helps - oh, how it helps! - that Leif's sleep has miraculously, instantly improved! The night I wrote bemoaning the situation, it changed. Three overnight wake-ups instead of five; last night Leif did two four-hour stretches of sleep. He's connecting his sleep cycles and I'm finally completing sleep cycles! Here's hoping this trend continues even through our intentional travel next week....

The puddle jumper and my sleep travails

Let's just start with something cute.

Oh, guys. This sleep thing. It's so rough right now. I've mentioned it before, and I'll belabor the point -- I'm not sleeping, but I am losing my mind.

Like clockwork, Leif wakes up every two hours at night (except when he wakes up every hour!). Which means that after waking up myself, feeding him, going to the bathroom, and getting back to bed, I sleep about 1.75 hours at a time until early morning (4ish), at which point Leif usually wakes every hour until August gets up and demands my presence in the kitchen at 6. It doesn't matter what time I go to bed or what time I turn of screens - I just can't get enough sleep. I can't even complete a single sleep cycle!

And I'm feeling it. I'm moody and exhausted, yes, but more insidiously, I just can't quite get things right. I forget times and dates. I miss (obvious) details. I can't remember the word I was looking for - and sometimes the word is as obvious as "knife" and I have to say something like, "the long thing you use at dinner on your plate" (that really happened). Simply put, I cannot be trusted with anything, much less anything important. And blogging feels almost entirely out of the question.

We don't know why Leif is waking so much - whether he's genuinely hungry that often, or doesn't know how to connect his sleep cycles, or he's cold, or his teeth hurt, or he'd prefer the sound of rain falling on a tin roof to the "summer rain" white noise we play for him - or if it's all of these things. Maybe he's just out to sabotage my sanity.

The irony is that we've put way more effort into teaching him how to sleep on his own than we ever did with August, and it turns out August was a better sleeper. Leif can put himself to sleep for some naps and he used to do it regularly for bedtime at night. I've been working on helping him learn how to get himself all the way to sleep rather than always nursing him to sleep, as we did with August, or rocking, walking, bouncing, or holding him until he's asleep. Sometimes he's fine on his own, sometimes he needs the tiniest bit of help (by which I mean I lie down next to him and he takes my face into his hands with the grip of death, lets out a contented sigh, and falls asleep), and sometimes it's a more involved process. But there's no doubt that he's actually getting good at getting himself to sleep with minimal parental involvement.

After our travels to the US, we're going to take strategic action. We don't know quite what the strategy will be, but we've got to do something.

So, here's your puddle jumper:

The spectators:

The poser:

Little napping wonder

Our sleep experience with Leif has been a trip. We've gone from it being impossible to get him to sleep to him easily putting himself to sleep for every nap and bedtime back to it being a major chore to help him get to sleep; from four or five 45-minute naps per day to a couple one-three hour naps per day; from getting up every two hours overnight to only getting up once back to getting up every two hours. As soon as we get used to a sleeping pattern, it changes.

When we visited the nurse yesterday she basically said Yep, that sounds right. With all the developmental stuff going on, and his shifting milk requirements, it's normal for sleep to be wonky at this age. It is so nice to have our health care provider tell us this and reiterate how normal it is. In the US, you can be shamed to think that if your baby isn't sleeping through the night at a ridiculously early age (3 months!), you are doing something wrong and have probably f&*ked up your baby's chance to become a good sleeper for the rest of his life. Here in Sweden, the biological norm is understood and accepted: segmented sleep is just the way it goes for a while. You aren't a bad parent if your infant sleeps like...a baby.

I used to post a ton of pictures of Augie sleeping; because Leif sleeps in a much darker room I don't have many of him. But, here:

Leif and I went on a little adventure yesterday to our new neighborhood to check out preschools for August. It was a gorgeous spring day in the countryside.

 I didn't like one of the schools but really like the other, but the one I liked is a bit out of the way so I don't know if we'll choose it. It's a Waldorf school.

A little art installation by August:

My kiddos

Not much to report around here...we had two gloriously sunny days that have made everything fresh and new again. Still no news on the apartment, we're waiting on some things.

August was still sleeping when I arrived at dagis to pick him up today - look at that mane:

4

Because you come here for them...

...not to listen to me ramble on about myself - some pictures from yesterday.

When I arrived at dagis yesterday Augie was still asleep. We've switched our schedule and pick him up early on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and yesterday it had taken him a long time to fall asleep. It was so precious to see him lying there.

The white rectangle beside him is a laminated photo collage of Augie with his family (parents, grandparents, cousins). His caregiver said that he lies there staring at it as he falls asleep. Isn't that sweet?

How Leif normally looks in a stroller:

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. 

Life over here

As suspected, my no-screens-after-9pm thing means that I'm just not able to post every night (or even every other night). And we haven't taken many pictures lately, so I don't have anything beautiful to share. A few updates, though:

We seem to be potty training Augie! I never told you, but several weeks ago (at least a month now) Augie just spontaneously peed in his potty about five times over a three-day period. We were happily surprised. It's been off and on since then, because we haven't really pushed it - we fully support and help him, of course, but we aren't forcing him to train now. He's even pooped in his little potty once! Yesterday evening he went pee in his potty three times, and asked James for a diaper when he wanted to poop. This is especially cool because we've done so little to "train" him - but we've talked about the potty a lot, we've helped him go, and we've left it up to him to actual use the potty. (Having him naked all the time pays off!)

Even better news is that the sleep situation is beginning to sort itself out. We recognized that Leif is on shorter cycles than we'd thought (he needs to be on his way to a nap one hour after he wakes up from a nap, and right now he's only napping for 45 minutes). We also recognized that our biggest problem was that we were trying to put him to sleep, when in reality, we just needed to leave him alone and let him find his way to sleep. Now, we are able to put him in his bassinet (after a short nursing and getting him in a sleeping coat), give him a pacifier, and walk out - and somewhere between 5-60 minutes later, he'll usually be asleep! It doesn't always work, and sometimes we have to lie next to him or put a hand on his tummy, but for now at least, he seems to have figured out how to put himself to sleep. (I tremble as I write this, because every time I share something about our sleep situation, it changes drastically that very day). He's doing well at night, usually with only two wake-ups.

Our next big challenge is to wean Augie off 1-2 nursings a day (he's currently doing 3). It's going to be soooo hard, as he loves the "boobies!" (and yes, that's now his preferred word for nursing).

Cleaning up while doing some pouring work with Mama:

Story time:

Family tummy time

Even Anna got in on the action:

  

Leif takes short naps (~45 minute) unless I nap with him or we go out and nestle him into the stroller bassinet; I use this as an excuse to nap with him several times a week:

Found this tucked away on James's phone, from our weekend with Uncle Robert:

He found it!

Leif's new trick these days is getting his hands into his mouth. It's a fairly recent skill and sometimes it keeps him occupied for minutes on end. And sometimes he lucks out and closes his hand with his thumb sticking out instead of in, and he gets to suck his thumb.

A little tummy-to-tummy nap we enjoyed yesterday:

Screens? No thanks

In yesterday's post, I forgot to tell you why I thought Friday and Saturday were so horrible, but Sunday was so much better.

Augie had been playing two little games on the iPad for a couple weeks - two innocuous, not-stupid-kid-game type of games - he'd play for a few minutes and then get bored and moved on. And then we (and by "we" I in no way mean "we", but one of us in particular) started to show Augie videos on the iPad, and then introduce him to really stupid games - and suddenly Augie was asking for the videos all the time. Rather than limiting his screen time, we (read note above) just kept giving him the iPad. All was well and good when he had it, but as soon as it was taken away, he started crying and whining and begging to nurse, and he would not give up. And this pattern would repeat over and over during the day. It was ugly.

Saturday night we talked about what role we wanted screens, and specifically the iPads, to play in our family life, and we (this time I really mean we) realized that we don't want any screen time for our family - at least when we're all together and interacting with the boys. Not for us, not for them.

So Sunday morning, neither of us got our iPads out, and when Augie asked for fish or monkeys or buses (games and videos he likes), we deflected and moved him on to something else. He didn't have a single meltdown all day, and he didn't ask to nurse except at his normal times, and he finally took a nice long nap.

Could be coincidental, could be causal. Either way, the iPads are on the shelf when the kids are up.

Unrelated to this post, here are a couple bed pictures:

Leif and I took a lovely long nap together this morning, and then in the afternoon he put himself to sleep for a second (considerably shorter) nap. We've been struggling with his sleep, but today I paid close attention to the clock to make sure I wasn't keeping him awake too long and getting him back to bed at the right moment, and that's when he put himself to sleep. It's so hard to figure these things out at this age because they change so frequently - just as soon as we've figured out his sleeping/waking patterns, they change. So I figure by the time I get us settled into a routine, it'll be obsolete. 

Good times with Grandma

I wanted to post yesterday, but it took six hours to get Leif to sleep. Six hours! That was with the three of us trading off to try our different tricks. He finally went to sleep at 10pm. Today, though, he put himself to sleep for two naps. (I'm still waiting for the s*&t to hit the fan just as dinner is served). It's hit or miss around here and we never know what kind of day we're going to get - but chances are good it will be exhausting.

Here are some pics from the last few days.

A dream come true

Look what different colors they are! 

Augie has been so great with Dai-dai; he showers him with kisses and hugs, he wants to carry and hold him several times a day, he shares his toys and food with him. He's only pulled his hair once, and only sat on him twice (both tonight at dinner). However, he's been acting out in other ways. We had friends over on Saturday afternoon - they have a baby three days older than Dai-dai and a boy who is four. Augie pulled this boy's hair three times, twice while they were playing alone in the bedroom, and once in front of all of us. At a playground on Saturday he pulled off other children's hats two or three times (presumably because he couldn't reach their hair?), and today at the local park he hit two kids over the head (but not hard, thankfully) with a plastic hockey stick for no reason at all! We've never seen this kind of behavior from him. We've seen him be territorial or possessive, but with the two kids he hit on the head with a hockey stick, there was no aggravating incident - he wasn't even playing with them. He just walked up to these kids and hit (more like tapped, but still) them. We suspect that it's anger and jealousy about Dai-dai manifesting in other ways, and we don't know what to do about it.

On a significantly happier note, one of my dreams came true today: the family nap. Dai-dai had been sleeping on my chest, as below, when Augie woke from his nap. He came into our room smiling and climbed into bed, then James climbed in next to him. I massaged Augie's back and head, and soon enough he was back to sleep, and I was sandwiched between my sleeping babies. *The best.* (Full disclosure: I didn't sleep at all because my neck was uncomfortable and I'd bee in the same position for ninety minutes; but that meant I got to savor the moment!)