We’ve had a couple large milestones here in La Casa De B. in recent months that I’ve failed to mention.
M. left the pull ups behind in March. It was one of those “We’re down to about ten pull ups, do we want to buy any more?” changes that we parents have to force upon our kids sometimes. She was cool with it, though, as she was ready. She had been taking naps without a pull up for about a month and avoided any incidents. We went back-and-forth for awhile, until the last pull up was gone, but she was super excited to be sleeping like a big girl. And, knock on wood, we’re three months into it and we’ve still had no accidents. It makes it easier to buy more fun stuff at Costco when you only have one box of diapers in the cart.
Second, C. finally started sleeping through the night around the same time. We do struggle to get her to sleep some nights, but most nights she goes to bed and stays asleep until the morning. When she does wake up, you just have to go tuck her back in and tell her to go to sleep and she drops right off again. Her funny (to her at least) trick is to go to bed, be half-asleep after I leave the room (I usually lay with her for 10-20 minutes to try to get her to sleep), and then about 10 minutes later, get out of bed and open her door. She waits with the door cracked, peeking out, until I come up the stairs to put her back down. Some nights she’ll act surprised and run back to bed giggling. Other nights, as soon as she sees me, she flings the door open, runs to the banister, and greets me with a big smile like it’s morning.
The only downside to C. sleeping all night is that she’s been getting up earlier in the morning. Most days one girl or the other comes into our room between 6:00 and 6:30 and crawls into bed with us. (S. might dispute the “us” part, since the girls always get into her side of the bed and disturb her while I roll over and go back to sleep on my side.) The problems usually start when the second girl comes in. Girl #2, for whatever reason, almost always comes in whining and crying, which often sets the other one off. It’s bad enough when your kids come wake you up. It’s even worse when they do so with tears.
But C. sleeps at night, which was by far her worst issue in the first 22 months of her life. Things aren’t that bad.