Tonight is Lex’s second night in his new bed,
and his second night falling out of the new bed :) Alan was
very smart and put the mattresses on the floor without the
frame. Lex loves the bed and didn’t come into our bed at all
last night. Yay! I don’t even think he knows he falls out of
bed. Both times I heard him fussing and found him still
sleeping and trying to get comfortable on the floor. I scooped
him back up and put him in bed and I don’t think he woke up at
all. Notice he still has his collection of blankets and
doggies. He’s so sweet!

Follow-up: I jinxed myself with
this post because he ended up coming into our bed several times
that night. Oh well, we’ll see how tomorrow
goes.

Lex has entered a weird, though probably
normal, hitting phase. He does it more out of curiosity than
anger, it seems. And he frequently announces his intentions
before actually doing anything. “I’m going to hit Eve,” he’ll
say. Or “Mommy, sit down so I can hit you.” Ummm…. right. He
also likes to throw things and has started doing weird role
playing sometimes, like this morning when he put Snoopy Dog in
a bucket and then put the school bus on top of him and told me,
“I’m hitting Snoopy Dog with the school bus.” All very
experimental and not angry, but I still don’t like it. I need
to reread the Love & Logic books because we are definitely
getting into new territory here. We were visiting with friends
tonight and Lex picked up a plastic snake and flicked it at
Tallis, not knowing how much it would hurt. Poor Tal ended up
with a welt on his neck and we headed home. Oddly enough, at
that same moment, Mike (Tallis’s dad) and I were talking about
the book Raising
Cain and another similar book they had read, both of
which discuss the nature of boys. I’m definitely going to have
to work on my parenting skills in this department. Sometimes I
miss the tiny boy he used to be. Sometimes he’s still a tiny
boy that curls up in my lap for stories and says, “I love you
mommy.”

This is super dorky to post, but I’m going
to anyway :) Lex and I had a great time this morning playing
with the K’Nex toys he got from his friends Luca and Tallis for
his birthday. We made lots of things, but these are what we are
most proud of. Lex made the car with the red bumper and helped
with the garage. I made the “creature,” but he made it do
Tae-bo. We had fun.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK65lw61rP4]

Lex hasn’t had a nap since Monday, which
was a nap on me on the couch. I decided this week to stop
forcing the issue and see how he does. Lesson learned: still
not ready to give up naps! He has been falling asleep between
6:00-6:30 each night and usually half asleep all day. He’s also
been getting up at 5:30am all week, possibly because of the
early bedtimes. These past few days he even takes pretend naps
and tells me that he’s sooo tired. But when I offer to let lay
down in his bed and listen to some music (code for take a nap)
he always says no. We are going out tonight (bringing dinner to
the Diehn’s with their new little bundle) and I decided that a
nap is a requirement. I figured I’d fight the fight if
necessary. Instead he was taking play naps all morning and went
upstairs about a half hour ago and went right to sleep. It
would be nice to think he’s starting to appreciate the value of
a nap, but we’ll see.

Along the lines of
sleep (or lack thereof) we are moving him into a twin bed this
weekend. He’s been coming into our bed a lot lately and I often
find him sleeping in his bed with his legs hanging off the
side, or hear him bumping into the wall a lot. He started
coming into our room in the morning a few months ago and it was
sweet, then he came in earlier and slept with me for a bit
before we got up, now he comes in several times a night. He
just crawls into the bed next to me and keeps sleeping, but it
wakes me up. Then I have to decided if I should bring him back
to his bed (knowing he’ll be back again anyway) or just let him
sleep with us for the rest of the night. I think a bigger bed
is definitely in order. He’s very excited about it too. We got
new sheets this week and I was going to set the bed up
yesterday, but it’s so buried in the storage room I decided to
wait for Alan’s help this weekend. Maybe we’ll all get a little
more sleep after that.

These are each about a minute long.

Lex and Eve wrestling. She’s such a trooper.
It’s fun to see them playing together and she even initiates
the rough-housing sometimes :)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zqur5Vg1EI]

Eve’s new skill, climbing up on the chair to
full standing position and letting go. She usually does this
quite quickly and ends up very giddy and proud of herself.
She’s a little cautious in this video though and I suspect it’s
because big brother is so close by. You gotta be on guard with
him around!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-Dbx_9gcF0]

One neat thing about watching them
grow up is seeing how they handle the attention the other gets.
Some times Lex is indifferent to our attention to Eve, other
times he jumps in and praises her too, but some times he seems
to want the same attention and it’s interesting to see how he
goes about getting it. In this video he climbs up on the chair,
but even he knows that’s not much of an accomplishment for him.
Kids are so amazing to watch.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tTld1-7xaY]

I joined Weight Watchers tonight. It’s a
big move for me and kind of a final step into grown-up-ness.
Sigh. I’m still carrying far too much baby weight and I’ve
decided that you can’t call it baby weight after the first
year, after that it’s just plain fat! I’ve been thinking about
it for awhile and Alan’s health insurance offers partial
reimbursement for membership. I was looking at college
graduation photos (where I weighed about 15lbs more than I do
now and a whole lot more than my lowest weight pre-kids) and I
decided that now is the time! Anyway, this is probably more
than any of you really need to know, but such is life. Wish me
luck!

At bedtime tonight Lex said, “I think I
need to put doggie in the belly carrier.” He then proceeded to
gently place doggie on his belly, then wrap it up in the
blanket and wrap his blanket around himself and behind his
back. I, of course, dashed downstairs to get the camera
:)