I really need to write this entry before my sweet girl is 6 months instead of 5!! Life has been crazy this last month-I had surgery, we are trying to move, and work has been insane. I feel like I'm just (barely) surviving the day to day, let alone documenting anything! But I love the photo album I made for Ben where I have blog posts and photos chronicling his first year, and I want to do the same for Hadassah, so here goes!
This month, Hadassah Grace has really been starting to act like an older baby. She has so much to say (VERY loudly!) and she is so strong and active! :-) This little girl has an opinion about just about everything, and she will let you know about it! Her smile is so sweet and precious and her joy is just as passionate and complete as any other emotion she displays, though!
She laughs and smiles pretty readily now. It's so interesting to see what things she thinks are funny! Ben often is in that category, and raspberries or tickling will get her laughing too.
She is head over heels in love with her daddy (and a pretty major flirt with guys in general!). She smiles and bats her eyes at him. Aww!
She REALLY wants to be mobile. She can scoot herself around pretty well on the floor, and I don't think we are too far from crawling. This kid has some crazy strong arms and legs!
She can almost sit up unassisted.
She is such a sweet snuggly baby when she wants to be, but sometimes she is too busy or interested in everything going on around her to snuggle!
She still has crazy hair! It's getting long enough that it can lay down sometimes (and I can pull it into teeny tiny pigtails!) but mostly it still sticks up everywhere.
I am so thankful to say that she sleeps MUCH better at night than her brother did. A normal night is about 3 wakings. We have a few rough ones that are more (5-6) but so far, we have not had any nights where she was up 8-10 times. I am so thankful to be just tired instead of desperately exhausted!
She is starting to show some interest in food that we are eating, so I think trying solids is coming up in the next month or 2! It's crazy to think she is already old enough to be ready for that!
Speaking of eating, she has started being very distractable while nursing (especially at lunch-the one time I need her to eat on a timeline!). Even though she and her brother have been tandem nursing since she was born, any time we try to tandem now, she pulls off to pat/pull his hair and touch his face. Which leads him to pull off and admonish her to use nice touches. LOL!
I feel like I don't have a tiny baby anymore, and it's so strange! I am enjoying watching this sweet girl grow, but as always it is a little bittersweet!
Saturday, June 28, 2014
Sunday, June 1, 2014
A Tale of Two (Potty) Poopers
This post probably won't interest a lot of my friends, and that is completely fine! Feel free to skip it. :-) But I know that at least some of my friends have asked me how EC is going with Hadassah and how potty training is going with Ben, so I thought I'd update about that.
For anyone who doesn't know, EC is elimination communication-it is not potty training the baby, but rather the parent learning to recognize when the baby needs to eliminate and then taking them to the potty. You can start it from birth if you want (I am too lazy to start it quite that young) and can be as fully into it or not as you choose.
The way we have done EC so far is that I have a goal of catching all of the poops in the potty by the time my baby is eating solid food. To be completely honest, my motivation was simple: I don't want to wash solid poop diapers! We started with Ben when he was around 2-3 months old, and it worked beautifully! I can count on one hand the number of poops he has done in a diaper since he was about 5 months old. One thing I think is important about EC is that you don't scold or shame the child if they go in their diaper-the responsibility to know soon enough and get to the potty is on the parent, not the child (and a few times I have actually apologized to Ben for not being able to get him to the potty when he asked to go-when we were in the middle of nowhere on roadtrips etc.).
We didn't start nearly that young with Hadassah, mostly because during that period of her life, we were completely overwhelmed and just trying to survive life until Josh graduated. She was with a lot of different caregivers, and it just seemed too difficult to try to work on EC if we weren't going to be able to be consistent. However, in the last week or so, we have been able to start! Thankfully, she had gotten into the habit of pooping not long after waking up, so we had at least 1 time of day when we knew she would probably go if we took her. We started with that-Josh would take her (I can't physically take her to the potty right now) early in the morning, tell her it was okay to go, and then cheer and get super excited for her when she did. We are now 3 days diaper-poop free! I'm sure it will take us a while to get to where we are completely trained, especially as I am returning to full time working soon. But it's exciting to see her catch on so quickly! She is starting to let us know, either by grunting or by doing lots of gas, but giving us enough time to take her potty. Given that (literally from birth) she HATES the feeling of being in a wet or dirty diaper, I think she is all about this pooping in the potty stuff!
Ben, in turn, has been working on potty training. To be perfectly honest, I don't think I would have tried to potty train him this young left to my own devices (he's been working on it since he was about 21 months old). However, he was really acting ready so we are just going with it. He has regularly pooped on the potty for a very long time, as mentioned earlier, so it wasn't a huge shift necessarily. The biggest thing is that his communication has gotten so much better! He started REALLY wanting to wear his Daddy's boxers all the time (which I would let him do-we tied the waist band with a sock to make them stay up) and I noticed that he never peed in Daddy's boxers, but if I offered to take him, he would go and pee in the potty. He also was frequently waking up dry from naps and would pee on the potty if I took him. So I figured, hey, we might as well try! I ordered tiny boxers (side note: 2T boxers are ridiculously cute!) with various animals on them (he LOVES animals right now). He was so excited to have boxers of his own! He had started calling potty "booboo" (poop or pee) so we told him that he was a big boy and got to wear boxers now, and we try not to booboo on the lions (or monkeys etc.). We started out by letting him pick each day whether he wanted to wear a diaper or boxers. Recently, we've just been starting out in boxers, though he does still wear a diaper at night and nap time. Some days, he requests a diaper and seems to need a break from having to pay attention to whether he needs to pee or not (today is one of those days) and I am fine with that. I am incredibly thankful that we have wood laminate flooring in most of our house instead of carpet, because that frees me up to really not care if he pees on the floor by accident. I would definitely not call him potty trained yet-sometimes he goes a little bit before realizing (though I am incredibly impressed that he can stop himself and make his way to the bathroom to finish) and if he is busy, he forgets to pay attention (so I don't trust him in boxers yet when we go out of the house) but he is well on his way. I feel like he has made it ridiculously easy on me-not sure how much of it is the EC and how much of it is just who he is, but I am definitely spoiled in this area!
So that is our potty update! Happy to answer questions if anyone has any! The summary is: EC isn't for everyone, but it has worked incredibly well for our family so far and it's one of the parenting choices I am super happy we made!
For anyone who doesn't know, EC is elimination communication-it is not potty training the baby, but rather the parent learning to recognize when the baby needs to eliminate and then taking them to the potty. You can start it from birth if you want (I am too lazy to start it quite that young) and can be as fully into it or not as you choose.
The way we have done EC so far is that I have a goal of catching all of the poops in the potty by the time my baby is eating solid food. To be completely honest, my motivation was simple: I don't want to wash solid poop diapers! We started with Ben when he was around 2-3 months old, and it worked beautifully! I can count on one hand the number of poops he has done in a diaper since he was about 5 months old. One thing I think is important about EC is that you don't scold or shame the child if they go in their diaper-the responsibility to know soon enough and get to the potty is on the parent, not the child (and a few times I have actually apologized to Ben for not being able to get him to the potty when he asked to go-when we were in the middle of nowhere on roadtrips etc.).
We didn't start nearly that young with Hadassah, mostly because during that period of her life, we were completely overwhelmed and just trying to survive life until Josh graduated. She was with a lot of different caregivers, and it just seemed too difficult to try to work on EC if we weren't going to be able to be consistent. However, in the last week or so, we have been able to start! Thankfully, she had gotten into the habit of pooping not long after waking up, so we had at least 1 time of day when we knew she would probably go if we took her. We started with that-Josh would take her (I can't physically take her to the potty right now) early in the morning, tell her it was okay to go, and then cheer and get super excited for her when she did. We are now 3 days diaper-poop free! I'm sure it will take us a while to get to where we are completely trained, especially as I am returning to full time working soon. But it's exciting to see her catch on so quickly! She is starting to let us know, either by grunting or by doing lots of gas, but giving us enough time to take her potty. Given that (literally from birth) she HATES the feeling of being in a wet or dirty diaper, I think she is all about this pooping in the potty stuff!
Ben, in turn, has been working on potty training. To be perfectly honest, I don't think I would have tried to potty train him this young left to my own devices (he's been working on it since he was about 21 months old). However, he was really acting ready so we are just going with it. He has regularly pooped on the potty for a very long time, as mentioned earlier, so it wasn't a huge shift necessarily. The biggest thing is that his communication has gotten so much better! He started REALLY wanting to wear his Daddy's boxers all the time (which I would let him do-we tied the waist band with a sock to make them stay up) and I noticed that he never peed in Daddy's boxers, but if I offered to take him, he would go and pee in the potty. He also was frequently waking up dry from naps and would pee on the potty if I took him. So I figured, hey, we might as well try! I ordered tiny boxers (side note: 2T boxers are ridiculously cute!) with various animals on them (he LOVES animals right now). He was so excited to have boxers of his own! He had started calling potty "booboo" (poop or pee) so we told him that he was a big boy and got to wear boxers now, and we try not to booboo on the lions (or monkeys etc.). We started out by letting him pick each day whether he wanted to wear a diaper or boxers. Recently, we've just been starting out in boxers, though he does still wear a diaper at night and nap time. Some days, he requests a diaper and seems to need a break from having to pay attention to whether he needs to pee or not (today is one of those days) and I am fine with that. I am incredibly thankful that we have wood laminate flooring in most of our house instead of carpet, because that frees me up to really not care if he pees on the floor by accident. I would definitely not call him potty trained yet-sometimes he goes a little bit before realizing (though I am incredibly impressed that he can stop himself and make his way to the bathroom to finish) and if he is busy, he forgets to pay attention (so I don't trust him in boxers yet when we go out of the house) but he is well on his way. I feel like he has made it ridiculously easy on me-not sure how much of it is the EC and how much of it is just who he is, but I am definitely spoiled in this area!
So that is our potty update! Happy to answer questions if anyone has any! The summary is: EC isn't for everyone, but it has worked incredibly well for our family so far and it's one of the parenting choices I am super happy we made!
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