More sleep issues...

This was taken the day Parker was born. From the looks of him you'd think he'd be quite good at sleeping. We were recently telling a friend who just had her second baby about how Parker slept 22 or 23 hours a day for the first 2 or 3 months of his life. He must be a sleep camel. The day after Andrew posted his sleep post Parker decided to boycott sleep again. It's really true that we often take one step forward and two steps back with these kids. The sleep seems to have leveled off a bit - helped in part by having turned the clocks back. For some reason I think he just prefers this to daylight savings. He still gets up WAY to early, but it's manageable.

Andrew is off on his first multi-day jaunt across Europe since we've been in London. It was always difficult for me when he was away when we lived in Maplewood. Usually his traveling coincided with some phase of an ongoing construction project - and I was pretty much ALWAYS pregnant while he was away. Thank god for the kindness of neighbors, where I had to take shelter from floods or gas leaks or other such construction mishaps.

Luckily there are no construction projects planned for the next four days. But boy, I'll tell you - I need a whole crew just to get these kids in bed at night. It took me a full hour and a half from bathtime to sleepy-time for both of them. Andrew does it every Thursday night on his own, often with the help of Sadie's favorite show, "Super Why", played on my laptop for her while he gives Parker his bottle and sends him off to Ja-Ja the aforementioned giraffe. I'd have adopted the same tactic but for the fact that Sadie was banging on my laptop earlier in the day and as punishment I withdrew the promise of watching the show. During the bottle she kept shoving toys in Parker's face and planting "kisses" on the top of his head - behavior that he was not too fond of, understandably so. When he was nearly asleep she fell off the chair she was perched on next to us and started howling, which sent poor Parker into a panic. I had to toss Sadie into her new "big-girl" bed (which is really just the mattress on the floor since the real bed has not yet arrived) and spend the next 45 minutes trying to calm Parker out of his hysterics. For now, all is quiet, at least until 2 am when Sadie will inevitably start screaming for her bunny who will have fallen out of bed.