Progress

We've had two days with big sleeping accomplishments - yesterday Charlie took a 2-hour morning nap, and today he took a 2-hour afternoon nap. The amazing part of this is that he was sleeping in the bassinet (the mattress was on an incline), not in the bouncy seat or car seat! He's still waking up quite a bit at night, but I keep hoping it will get better soon.

Other random news - Eli let me put Charlie on his prized Spiderman couch with him for a few minutes without too much protesting. This is progress from last time. It helped that Eli was distracted with the Laurie Berkner Band DVD :) He loves the music.

My family came over last night to visit. My parents and Gram are all doing the low glycemic diet and are losing weight. I'm really impressed with their dedication and think they look great! I wish I had more willpower right now to do something similar to lose the last of the baby weight, but I went to Trader Joe's last week and bought my favorite Almond in the Coconut chocolates... that's not exactly low glycemic.

Here's Eli on our new couch! We finally have a place to sit in our living room. It will still be a while before the room feels put together, but we're happy to make progress a little bit at a time.
Poor Eli had a night terror last night, or something like it. He woke up around 9 p.m. screaming and pretty out of it, and it took a long time for him to calm down and go back to sleep. Apparently it's more likely to happen when kids are overtired, and Eli was totally wiped out after not napping (since we have afternoon church this year). Today he slept until 8:45 a.m. and still took a 3 1/2 hour nap! I was able to take a 2-hour nap while Charlie was also napping, and then even took a shower, dried my hair, and wrote this blog post while Eli slept. Amazing!

"You're Wearing Jeans!"

Charlie was up a lot last night and basically stayed up from 4 a.m. on, so I was feeling pretty wiped out from the long night. I decided that I had to get out of the house to stay sane, so we ventured to Target. It was a great first outing for the three of us - Charlie slept in his car seat the whole time and Eli was so happy and well behaved. This afternoon was great - Eli took a really long nap and I even got Charlie to fall asleep at the same time - I napped for a whopping three hours and woke up feeling somewhat human again.

It was pretty funny that one of the first things Ben said to me tonight when he came home from work was, "You're wearing jeans!" since I haven't worn anything remotely cute in the last two weeks. Eli was in the kitchen with us and got excited with him and kept repeating, "Jeans!" I promise I'm not always a bum... :)

A Happy Birthday

I turned 28 today. Whoo hoo! Here are some things that have made today/my birthday special:

1. My parents came over yesterday to help me get ready for this busy week. We have Ben's sister Heather, her husband Rob, and their four cute kids flying in tonight and I had lots to do! My mom ran errands with me and Eli while my dad was at our place working remotely on his laptop during the day, and they both helped in the evening too to get our house clean. My mom even made my favorite chocolate chip cookies. AND she drove to a very far Baskin Robbins location to get my favorite ice cream turtle pie for my birthday. I scored one of my mom's beautiful handmade aprons as an early birthday present and some money to go toward our couch fund - so nice!

2. I opened my birthday gift from Aunt Babz - it is the cutest frog wallet I have EVER seen. And probably the cutest wallet I have ever owned. Thank you!!

3. It's a beautiful (but cold), sunny day with bright blue skies. I had breakfast this morning at Walker Brother's with some wonderful friends. The potato pancakes were delicious and it was so fun to get together. I even got applesauce in my hair a few times, courtesy of myself or Eli, I'm not sure which one.
4. After two days of not napping again, Eli took the world's longest nap today!! I put him down at 11:30 (earlier than usual) since he seemed really tired at breakfast. He slept for almost 4 hours! I had the most relaxing time, catching up on blogs, reading magazines that I've fallen behind on, and enjoying a quiet house. Here are some pictures after his nap:


5. Tuesday is trash day, and we have three different trucks come through our alley - one picks up trash, another picks up recycling, and another picks up yard waste. The recycling guys found an envelope with a check inside and actually returned it to me! I had the envelope sticking out of the mailbox and it must have flown out - they found it in the alley and rang my doorbell. I called our city's Streets and Sanitation and told the supervisor how wonderful these guys were.

6. I've had fun phone calls, voice mails, blog messages and facebook comments with happy birthday wishes - thank you :) And last night Eli was so cute, singing parts of Happy Birthday to me - it totally made my night. I captured a tiny bit of it on video:

Happy Monday!

Enough grumpy posts. Today is a mostly happy one! Eli slept until 8 a.m. - such an indication of how tired he was yesterday... I was thrilled and grateful though to wake up (totally on my own, not b/c of a certain someone being loud) at 7:45 and realize he was still asleep.

We had a fun couple of hours this morning, just relaxing and playing together at home. I had fun trying to keep up with him and sneaking in a few snapshots. A lot of the pictures that didn't make it on to this post were too blurry - this kid doesn't stop moving for very long.

Of course, a 14-month-old running around a small space meant disaster was almost inevitable. Eli tripped and bonked his forehead on the hardwood floor (he just missed the rug, unfortunately). See below for evidence of the big red mark smack in the middle, above his eyebrows.

The poor little guy kept reaching up and hitting his head after it happened - I finally realized his head must be hurting from bumping it and gave him some tylenol. He ended up going down for an early nap a while later - I'm curious to see if this is his one nap for the day, since it started at 10:40 and he's been going strong for 2 1/2 hrs now!

I love the quiet moments at home when he's asleep. This morning I scheduled my 20-week ultrasound (for September 9th!), took a long shower, caught up on friends' (and strangers') blogs that I like to read, made a big grocery list, and vigilantly ignored the looming need to start packing. Today is a good day.