Seven Quick Takes: Sleep, Snow, Socks

I

I know it's waaaaaay too soon to declare victory, but we're excited anyway: today is the third consecutive day that Little Bear has taken a nap in his own bed (and under the blanket, no less), and last night he fell asleep in his own bed and stayed there until almost 1:00 am! It was so weird to have time together without him awake. We did the math, and it had been 2 years, 2 months, and 20 days since we last fell asleep in our own bed without him between us. Wow.

II 

A lot of people have been pretty free with their opinions on us letting him stay in our bed so long, but I'm glad that we waited until he was ready to switch because so far the transition has been painless; he laid down in his own bed without me even asking him to this afternoon, but the times we tried when he was younger, he would spend an hour arching and kicking and screaming and rolling until I finally gave up. This is so much easier! Not to say that we don't hope that any future kids will be ready to make the transition at a younger age, before they are quite as big and strong and pillow-hogging as he is. But it seems like (naïve mom-of-one talking here) it would be easier with an older sibling to hold up as a role model... Anecdotal evidence, anyone?

III

Little white flecks were drifting past the car windows this morning as I drove Matt in to work, but they were few enough and small enough that if you purposely didn't look too hard, you couldn't see them. I'm just going to keep telling myself that it isn't really snowing in September...

IV

Matt got a new chef's knife for his Asian cooking class. He brought it home last night very excited: "It's like chopping vegetables with a lightsaber!"

V

Little Bear doesn't watch a lot of TV, but when I'm home alone with him in the evening and the dishes aren't going to wash themselves while he wants to hang on my skirt and whine, I'll often turn on an episode of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood. (That one show and its ability to give me ten minutes to myself is absolutely worth the price of the Netflix subscription) And he's actually learning good things from it! Yes, he runs around saying, "Trolley! Ding ding! Ugga mugga, Daniel Tiger," but he's also started cleaning up without being asked, and if I tell him to pick one more thing to do before it's time to go take his nap, he'll think about it, tell me what he wants to do, do it, and then run down to the bedroom.

VI

Tell me about your kids' winter footwear, especially if you live somewhere cold. What are the best boots? We need something that will stay warm well below 0, and will stay dry in the squishy wet snow this fall and in breakup next spring. Also, perhaps more importantly, socks: really, really warm socks. The wool socks for little feet I've seen in town are ridiculously expensive! And you can't just layer regular cotton socks; that doesn't add any appreciable warmth, and winds up restricting blood flow. Surely there's another option?

VII

I got a rewards code from Huggies last month for a free photo book from Shutterfly. We put our wedding album together through their site, and decided to use this chance to start making annual photo albums since we never ever print photos. Since we got married halfway through 2011, we figured this first book would cover the latter half of 2011 plus all of 2012. We came up with a whole list of things that'd happened in that time that would be good to include pictures of, and I sat down to work on it earlier this week (of course I put it off for two months and the code expires this weekend). And discovered that we didn't really take photos our first year married. As bad as I thought we are about taking photos now of Little Bear, we were so much worse at ever pulling out the camera before he was born. After our wedding, I have photos from our mid-September 2011 trip to the Glenallen area and Valdez, and then pretty much nothing until we went to Monterey, CA, in March 2012. And then there's one photo of me pregnant—just one—and a couple of cooking photos, and then Little Bear arrives in July 2012. First Christmas married? Easter? Anything at all with snow in it? Any pregnant photos before or after 30 weeks? Nothing. It's ridiculous. My mom was rightly appalled, and I'm running over to her house this afternoon to see what pictures she has of us from that time period so I can finish the book before the deadline.

For more quick takes, visit Conversion Diary! Have a great weekend.