Life and schedule update v9 (25 months)

The Sunday before their first birthday (late November), the babies dropped their morning nap. They stayed up until 12 or 1230 and then crashed. I was like, okay, they’re down to one nap a day now! It took a few weeks of being very cranky in the late afternoon, but only occasionally taking what we call a bonus nap, to get into the groove of being one-nap babies. (They’ll still take an extra nap sometimes, if they don’t sleep enough for the first one. But sometimes they’ll be super crabby and refuse to nap again.)

Their wakeup time has fluctuated just a bit, but is generally in the 7-30 range. This is pretty great, we think. I mean, we would rather not get up that early, but obviously it’s better than anything in the 6:00 hour!

Since that nap transition, we’ve also completely weaned then off formula and to (organic whole) cows’ milk! They go through a gallon every 3/4 days, which costs $6 at Trader Joe’s. In comparison, a can of formula used to last the same amount of time and cost $17. Slashed that budget by two-thirds!! They’ve also dropped a feeding/bottle, so now their schedule is the easiest yet: Bottle at wakeup, breakfast an hour later, lunch around 1130, two-hour-ish nap, bottle in mid-afternoon (between 2 and 3), dinner at 530, last bottle at 7, bedtime at 730. Additionally, we’ve been reducing the amounts in the bottles, so far to about six ounces each.

Yes, we still give them bottles, even though they’re over a year old. I know that they aren’t “supposed” to have bottles anymore, and “should” be using sippy cups or actual cups by now. I don’t even care. I don’t want to fight that battle, and I know plenty of people/babies who do bottles past one year old. We’ll get them to cups/sippies someday.

The babies have been going to daycare for a few months now. Except only sort of, because they keep getting sick and missing days. At daycare they’ve still been in the infant room, though the teachers started offering them the toddler lunch. It seems to be a crap shoot if they eat it, and sometimes only one wants any. The bigger issue at daycare is that they don’t really nap. For the first month or more, they only slept for like 20-40 minutes, instead of two hours. Ugh.

At home we’ve been a bit lazy about doing more “solid” solid food, so we still give them a lot of soft/runny foods (like applesauce and yogurt) and purees. We have started to work on giving them whole foods: small chunks of bread or bagel, actual peas, bites of pulled pork, chunk of cooked chicken, bits of fruit. So far we don’t have any big winners or foods that both babies will actually eat. Often they’ll eat a couple bites and then make a face and let the food dribble out of their mouth. Sigh. I’m trying not to fret too much that they aren’t eating all real-people food all the time yet. Last night we all went to an American restaurant and they ate most of a grilled cheese sandwich! I was pretty psyched about that. I do “know” that babies need several (or more than several) introductions/opportunities to try foods….I am just impatient and I want them to eat whatever we give them. 🙂 So like I said, we’re trying. We’ll get there eventually!

Sleep is definitely getting better in general. There aren’t many night wakeups. Lately since they’ve been sick, they get these big coughing fits randomly and sometimes they’ll wake themselves up. This tends to happen before we go to bed, though, and often they’ll be totally quiet the rest of the night. HOWEVER, there is supposed to be a 13-month sleep regression. The last two sleep regressions hit them about a month and a half late, which would put this one in February. That’s gonna be really hard after us all getting some good rest!

They’re really working on so many things–M is almost a walker, and they seem to be picking up a few signs, and they are into exploring everything. We’ve gotten to the point where we can’t eat or drink anything if we’re near them. Well, actually, I guess that’s been difficult for months now, but now they make all this noise (this kind of EEHHHHHH whine, like give it to me I want to tryyyy itttt) and dang, they can reach so far now! They like to play with utensils and food containers, they still like banging things together, and they still like opening and closing babygates and kitchen cupboards. They continue to aggressively love lift-the-flap books–they keep ripping off the flaps. Just this past week they suddenly figured out how to climb on and climb off their riding toys! So much going on in those little baby brains and bodies.