Evie Update

A ghostly wakeup

/ Shane / 5 Comments

There is a new weapon in the war against Evie waking up too early. We have finally resorted to the supernatural.

Evie has always had trouble staying asleep, some of which has been documented here. Through various tricks and subterfuge, we have sometimes managed to make her sleep in later (by later, I mean 5:30 or 6), but just when we start to congratulate ourselves on our success, she will start a push to get up earlier and earlier. It was in the middle of one such push, that we decided something new had to be done.

The problem is that Evie (and all toddlers) love routines. Everything that happens to her, she tries to incorporate it into a routine. Sometimes this can be used to our advantage, like the routine we use to get ready for bed, and sometimes it hurts us. In this case, her preferred routine was to wake up at about 5, and then have me come in to tell her it was too early. Then we repeated this at 5:40, 5:50, etc. until Sara came in to get her up around 6. She loved to talk about how daddy came in and told her to go back to sleep. And as time went on, the wake ups became earlier, more frequent, and she became more reluctant to go back to sleep.

I started trying to explain to Evie about the clock, and how she can’t get up until the first number is 6. She seemed interested, but I think it was a little much. It was hard to know that the first number was the important one, and the other numbers didn’t matter in this case. Also, Sara pointed out that she wouldn’t be able to understand that 5 is too early, but if she woke up and it was 7, that was okay. So Sara had found some toddler alarm clocks online that you can set to display an icon, such as a sun, when it was okay to wake up, or a moon if it was too soon.

Rather than spending money and buying some specialized clock, we realized we could make do with what we had. We used an extra light timer we had lying around, and we hooked that up to a set of ghost lights that we had hung in her room as a Halloween decoration.

I can’t begin to tell you how fantastically this has worked. She has been sleeping in (or at least staying quiet in her crib, which amounts to the same thing as far as I’m concerned) until 6:30 every day for almost two weeks! And she’s so excited for the ghost lights to come on. The first day, by the time we got into her room, she was literally jumping up and down and pointing at the ghost lights in glee, yelling, “Mommy! Daddy! The ghost lights came on! They said boo and I woke up!”

And this is despite the fact that Sara and I continue to botch the job as much as humanly possible. On the first day, when success was the most important, we accidentally set the time wrong, so that the lights came on like 45 minutes later than they should have. This meant she was yelling for us to come in and we were cringing in our room, trying to decide if we should go in or wait. After that, it took a couple more days before we managed to get the timing right. The timer is not digital, and there is a lot of ambiguity about the time it is displaying.

All in all though, it has been amazing. It has probably been one of the single most effective tools we have used to keep her in bed until a reasonable time. And now that we have the system in place, we are able to adjust her schedule by subtly adjusting the timer over the course of a few days, without her noticing. This is how we moved her from 6 to 6:30, and also how we managed to control the time change without disrupting her sleeping schedule.

The downside is that we’re stuck with ghost lights in her room for the foreseeable future. But maybe someday we can find some other kind of fun light to switch off to.

That’s what I call a nice weekend

/ Shane / 2 Comments

The weather was so beautiful this weekend. Summer’s last hurrah, I suppose. We tried to spend as much time as possible outside, since Evie is going to be penned inside all winter. This may have backfired a little bit in the sense that she now is really excited for playing outside, and is going to be disappointed when the weather turns cold and we can’t.

Anyway, we practiced riding the tricycle on Friday and Saturday, and her improvement was incredible. On Friday she was constantly steering into things and had trouble keeping the trike going in a straight line. By Saturday, she was steering pretty well. She still gets distracted easily, and then forgets to steer, but at least when she is paying attention she does a good job. She also figured out how to peddle on her own. The tricycle has a handle on the back, so normally we push her. But once she figured out how to do it on her own, she didn’t want anything to do with that handle. In fact, she made me remove the handle and carry it, so she could be sure we weren’t pushing when she wasn’t looking. She usually needs a push to break her inertia, but once she is going, she can keep going until she stops. Then she needs another push to get going again.

(You can see another video here)

Growing up, we could play in the yard whenever we wanted, but living in the city, it’s not so easy for Evie. Finding a place to play means walking to a designated playing area. So, on Sunday, Evie and I walked up to the Midway to play in the grass there. We played tag, kicked balls, climbed up and down stairs, had races, and played hide and seek. It was a lot of fun! I figured Evie would have a good time, but I was surprised at how much fun I had.

One of the funny things that happened was when we were playing hide and seek. We were basically in a big field, so there really wasn’t many places to hide. Evie didn’t care though, she thought it was so much fun. She would just run out into the middle of the field and stand and wait for me. Not wanting to just walk right over to her, I would make a big show of looking around a few places before “finding” her. If I took too long, she would helpfully yell, “Daddy!” so that I could find her. So, when it was her turn to count, she told me exactly where to “hide”. I ended up hiding a few feet away (by hiding I mean sitting in the open, but covering my head). When she was done counting, she got pretty mad that I wasn’t hiding where she told me to. So I told her to count again, and I moved to the exact spot she indicated. When she was done counting, I expected her to run right over to me. She knew exactly where I was; she placed me there. But instead, she made a big, exaggerated show of looking in a few other places first. Here I thought I was fooling her. I guess there’s no putting one over on that kid. 🙂

She continues to surprise me with her grasp of language. Like when she told Sara, “Maybe we could wear similar sweatshirts!”

She also continues to surprise me with making up songs. I would expect at her age she would be into repeating songs she hears a lot, or in making up songs about what she is doing. And she does do both of those things. But when she and Sara both wore pink shirts, she burst out singing “Two pink girls, singing in the rain!” No idea where that one came from. It wasn’t even raining.

Finally, the other day she was taking a nap when she cried out, “I want it, I want it, I want it!” so I opened the door, but she wasn’t sitting up. I whispered, “Are you awake?” as a joke, since I knew she was awake; I had just heard her. But she wasn’t awake, she was completely out. We have been noticing lately a new possessiveness, a new demanding-ness, a true toddler I-want-it-all-and-I-want-it-right-now-ness…but usually not when she’s sleeping.

Halloween – everything we hoped and more

/ Shane / 2 Comments

It was a good weekend. Evie really got into the Halloween experience. I wasn’t sure if she was going to be a little too young to understand or appreciate things, but I don’t think she was. She was a little shy with saying “Trick-or-treat!” and she often forgot to say, “Thank you!” or she would mumble it to Sara or I after she had already turned away. But she caught on really quick to holding her bucket up and getting a piece of candy.

We went to a certain street in our neighborhood that is known to be a little crazy about Halloween, drawing people from all over the city. Every story I heard about the place was totally true, and we were done by 5:30. I can only imagine how crazy it would be by 6:30 or 7. My mom kept saying, “This is like a movie!” It was pretty crazy, but it was a lot of fun to be around so many people who were really into the spirit of things. There were lots of displays in yards, people dressed up, and spooky decorations, but these people really took it to the next level. One of my favorite things was a giant spider rigged 20 feet overhead with a pulley system, so it could drop down on unsuspecting people. I also remember a giant plastic knife that was rigged out on a rope, so it could go flying across the street through the air as if possessed.

There were some houses that Evie thought were too scary to go to. There was a giant spider suspended over a door that Evie refused to walk under, even though she confided to Sara, “It’s not real.” Another person in a mask took her by surprise and she just froze in place, refusing to move until the person dangled some M&M’s for her. Sara and I agreed that M&Ms were probably the only thing that could have gotten her to go any closer.

But overall, Evie had a blast. My mom remarked that Evie would probably be playing “trick-or-treat” for quite some time to come. I think we didn’t do too bad either, considering we convinced her to stop in the middle and eat a banana. I doubt any of the other parents had such luck.

Other than that, it was a pretty quiet weekend. We dealt with the time change (though I never found a suitable hour to re-live) and we did some getting ready for the impeding winter, including packing our grill off to storage and removing the tomato cages from the garden. Yesterday was officially the last day for the garden, and I expect it will either be demolished immediately, or sit tantalizingly empty forever, just out of reach. It is possible that we could get another plot in some other garden elsewhere, but I am sort of drained about the whole garden thing, so we might just sit it out. We’ll see.

Finally, we found the time to hit up our favorite breakfast spot, Yolk. Everything was delicious, as usual. But the interesting thing was that my mom ordered the “South Beach” and it was something to see. People were literally turning their heads as it was carried through the restaurant. That might have been because it looked like perhaps my mom was the Don Corleone of the fruit mafia, and she had just ordered someone to bring her the head of the Chiquita Banana lady.

The South Beach consists of half of an entire pineapple, on its side, piled high with granola, strawberries, orange slices, and other fruit. This stuff is literally overflowing off the top and piling up on the surrounding plate. After my mom ate all she could, we cut off the top and bottom and still couldn’t fit it in the largest to-go box they had. It was worth ordering, just to see the thing.

Unfortunately, the picture I took on my camera phone doesn’t really do it justice, so you’ll just have to imagine it.

Happy Halloween!

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Evie, dressed as the bat Stellaluna, enjoyed her first ever trick-or-treating experience! This Halloween, I hope all of you have as much fun as a toddler!

Bat costume

Stellaluna visits the bats

“Outback” Milk

/ Shane / 6 Comments

The other day, we drove miles and miles to go to one of our favorite restaurants, Outback Steakhouse. Hey Outback, what’s the deal with the Outback-free bubble over Chicago? A lot of people live here, you might want to give it a try!

Anyway, we were ordering Evie a kids meal and we decided we might as well order her a milk. We knew she wouldn’t drink it, but it came with the meal, so we thought “might as well”. We have tried since the dawn of time to get that girl to drink milk, she is not interested. Right about the time that she was quitting bottles, we had some success giving her milk in a bottle, but I think that was the bottle nostalgia factor. Other than that, nada. And when I say we tried, I mean it! We started drinking milk ourselves with every meal, we tried calling it different names, we bought fun Elmo cups that could be used only for milk, we even let Evie decorate cups herself with cow stickers. I even remember a string of a couple of nights were Sara and I would “moo” every time we took a drink! She wasn’t having it.

So imagine my surprise when she started going to town on the glass of milk at Outback! Quick to seize the opportunity, I started saying things like, “How is that Outback Milk?” or “Mmm, you really like Outback Milk, don’t you?” Then we went to the store and bought some 2% milk (we have previously tried whole and skim, plus a couple of custom-made varieties involving a mixture of skim and half-and-half). The 2% carton is blue, which we told her indicates Outback Milk. We also dug out a few cups that looked as close as possible to the cup she had at Outback, including some straws.

So far, it seems to be working! She is sucking that stuff down like there’s no tomorrow. I’m sure she will pull her usual stunt and decide tomorrow that she’s totally off the milk again, so I’m holding my breath. Overall though, even if this only goes on for a couple of weeks, I think we did a most excellent job of thinking on our feet and capitalizing on a situation.