Jefflog

Well, well, if it isn’t my old friend the weblog. I typically don’t have much time to write these days, but Maggie is taking a nap, Oliver is busy chomping on the teat, and I’m too tired to get any work done, which makes this a rare opportunity to post an update.

Oliver is doing much better lately. Some of it has been due to a thoughtful friend buying us the book The Happiest Baby on the Block, which is full of good advice to soothe a fussy baby. The other part has been due to Hong cutting out dairy from her diet, which we strongly suspect causes a lot of intestinal grief for him. (Did you know that some 90% of Chinese people are lactose intolerant? Neither did we until recently.)

Maggie’s also been behaving more like a two-year old lately. Four or five weeks ago, we started letting her sleep on the big bed. She hadn’t yet started to climb out of her crib, but we had let her take her naps on the big bed for a while and she always slept just fine. And even though she could have gotten out at any time, usually she’d just wait for us to get her after she wakes up. She was so easy to deal with.

Then about two weeks ago, I guess we waited too long to fetch her because she figured out that she could get out of bed by herself, anytime she wanted to. This includes immediately after we tuck her in and leave the room. Now bedtime and naptime have become a power struggle, with her wanting to get out of bed unless she’s drop-dead tired. It was really bad for the first week, often requiring a couple of trips taking her back to bed, but last night she didn’t leave the bed when we left, being content to pout while staying on the bed. Before long, I imagine, the crying will dry up, too.

Actually, Maggie’s grandmother just sent over some little stuffed animals and a Noah’s ark pillow that we can bribe Maggie with. Every day she goes to bed without crying, she gets an animal to put in the ark. We’ll see how well that works.

Meanwhile, she still gets out of bed when she wakes up in the morning, which is fine by me. She quietly opens her door, softly knocks on our bedroom door, and waits for us to open it. I don’t know where she learned that she should knock on our door before coming in. We didn’t teach her, or at least we can’t remember teaching her. I guess some parts of raising children turn out to be easier than they could be.