Mealtime struggles with a toddler

If you need to practice your patience, I have a really great exercise for you: try to teach a toddler to use utensils to eat. Zoey has been learning, trying, and practicing for months now and it still frustrates me. I cooked her a bowl of oatmeal today and she insisted, like always, on eating it all by herself. This would be fine if she could actually get the food to get mouth before turning the spoon and dumping it all over herself, the table, chair, and floor. She is stubborn about this particular thing.  If I try to explain to her that she has to keep the spoon facing upward on the way to her mouth, or heaven forbid try to show her, she freaks out and shakes the oatmeal filled spoon trying to get me to let go. I, in turn, trying to prevent a gigantic mess of splattered oatmeal in hair and on walls, hold on to the spoon even tighter, which, of course, makes her shake the spoon even harder. It's quite the struggle and it makes meal time last oh so long. Today tho, after 5 or 10 minutes of this patience practice, Zoey took a good spoonful of oatmeal, slowly brought it to her mouth, keeping her elbow up and her spoon facing the right direction the whole time and slipped it directly between her little lips without even a drop falling off. I praised her and told her to do it just like that again. To my surprise, she did do it just like that again! And again and again. Finally something clicked between her brain and her little muscles to complete the task like she has meant to. All of a sudden she was eating the whole bowl of oatmeal like a regular spoon user. Wahoo! I was so happy, I wanted to squeeze her.

It's hard to believe that all of the negative things I have felt over each meal time in the past few months were erased and made completely worth it by this couple of minutes of accomplishment of eating a bowl of oatmeal. I tell you though, it happened.  I don't even care about any of that anymore. I'm just a proud little mama. I was even more proud when I gave her noodles for lunch and she was still able to use the spoon to get them to her mouth. You never really know if something is a one time occurrence or if it will stick till the next time.  Today, I relish the joys of motherhood that outweigh the frustrations.

Bye bye crib

I want to write down the process we are going through as we transition Zoey out of her crib.  It might be interesting to look back on later when we are ready to try with another kid. Zoey is 21 months old now.  We bought a toddler bed that is low enough to the ground that she can climb in all by herself and it has a little railing on each side of her pillow so she doesn't fall of the bed.  It holds a crib size mattress. It is a used one that we found on the ksl classifieds; $40 for the bed and mattress.  We picked it up on Sunday and just let it be in her room for a couple of days.  She would climb onto it and get used to it when I was putting the laundry away or just doing whatever in her room during the day.

I thought we'd start with night time and get that established before I tried naps. She can see better for naps and I don't want her climbing out after a 20 minute snooze. Right now we've got a good thing going with naps where she goes down willingly and sleeps at least an hour and a half. I'm not in a hurry to mess that up. 

On Wednesday, day 1: Tanner put her in the new bed at bedtime. She snuggled in and didn't even act like anything was different.  She slept the whole night till 6:15am,  when she woke up and cried, "daddy, daddy, binky, binky." I think she was scared because she woke up in a new place. Tanner went in to her to try to coax her back to sleep for at least another hour.  She stood up like she would do in her crib and just cried, "get out!  Get out!" meaning that she wanted to get out of bed.  She didn't even realize that she could climb out of this one by herself.  Sadly, we didn't get that extra hour of also we are hoping for.

Day 2: I can't remember all that well. I guess because it was a couple of days ago and apparently nothing that noteworthy happened. I believe she slept like normal till 7ish, climbed out,  and came to cuddle with tanner in the morning.

Day 3: I checked the monitor at 5 and saw that she didn't have her blanket or binky which often means we will have an early morning when she realizes it. So I snuck into her room like a ninja, recovered her, and placed her binky very close to her hand so she could easily put it back in when she wanted. Just as I was closing the door behind me as I left, she saw me and started to cry for me to come sit by her as she fell asleep again. Dang! So I went back and sat on the floor next to her bed forever because I wanted her to be all the way asleep before I attempted to leave again.  This time I made a safe escape. The morning was pretty great tho. When she woke up at 7ish , she looked around and said, "bed, beddy, bed" in her happy, well rested voice.  She climbed out of bed and said, "Yay!" and went straight downstairs. She came back up about 5 or 10 minutes later,  said hi to tanner in bed and went back downstairs to watch a show on the tablet (cus she knows how to turn one on all by herself) for another quiet hour.  Can you believe it?! I didn't have to wake up with her and go entertain her.  She actually let us sleep without causing any trouble or whining or anything.  I felt a little guilty around 8 and went down to be with her anyway.

Day 4: Zoey woke up at 4:15 to realize she didn't have her blanket on anymore and her binky was lost. She screamed, "daddy, daddy!", (notice what a daddy's girl she is) hurried to climb out of bed, and ran to our room.  Tanner took her back to her room and lulled her back to almost - asleep.  But she noticed when he tried to leave the room and tried to climb out of bed again.  He ended up putting her in her crib so he could get away without her following him.  She didn't mind when he left after that.

Day 5: She has been cranky all day.  We had to put her in her crib to sleep tonight because she won't stay in her bed and had to cry for a minute before falling asleep.

Day 6: I tried to put her in her bed, but she stood up and begged for her crib.  I didn't feel the need to fight with her about it, so in the crib she went. She was happy to be there and laid down immediately.
Hmm.. Maybe she's not really ready to grow up in that way yet.  I wonder if the runny noise that started today has anything to do with it. Although I would love to not have to go get her out of her crib every morning, it's not worth it if we have to go in to her at 4am instead.  I'm okay with waiting a little longer. I'll just update as we go.

update: 27 weeks along with baby boy

I have 12 weeks left of being pregnant. I believe that puts me officially into the third trimester. I am feeling anxious to have the baby! Not only because I don't particularly enjoy being pregnant, which I don't, but mostly because I just want him to be here with us. I want our family to be complete. Even tho we know he is real and I can feel him moving inside of me all the time, it's like he's only pretend. He isn't really here. Not yet.

I can't wait for Zoey to finally know her little brother and to start to get used to the life of sisterhood as opposed to only-childhood. I feel like the longer she is here, alone, with only mommy and daddy, the more she thinks that is how things are supposed to be. She is getting awfully familiar with hogging all of our attention.  The longer this baby stays inside my body, the harder it is going to be for her to get used to having another baby in our house. I'm being a little bit dramatic I'm sure. How much of a difference is 3 months going to make anyway? I don't know. I can't do anything about it anyway. But I just want him here with us now.

My sister, Taylor, just had a baby shower this past weekend.  And my mom was smart enough and adamant enough to get a picture of she, my cousin Leisa, and I all together with our baby bellies. We are all having boys. If you include my other cousin, Nicole, who has a one month old baby, and my sister-in-law, Staci, who is 6 weeks behind me, you will count 5 baby boys all born within 6 months of each other. Our little guy is going to have some fun buddies to hang out with when the time comes. Anyway, here are the pictures that my mom took of us. Just for the sake of knowing what I look like this go-round, since I've taken about 0 pictures this whole pregnancy. I am 27 weeks along, Leisa is 41, Taylor is 34, and Taylor's aunt is 24 weeks along with twins. I hope no one minds me putting pictures of them here.

Baby belly kiss