Keeping up with the Monster

My daily mission while C's at school...

1. Strategically plan around nap time

2. Find cheap entertainment

3. Teach him something

4. Bonus: accomplish something on my to-do list

When C's home, the boys are usually thrilled to see each other.  Noah continues to wave at Connor for the first 5 minutes of seeing him home from school.

The Noah Monster has become the Snack Monster.  He whines at the pantry door frequently, grabs a bag of goldfish, and brings it to me to open.  What's funny is he doesn't each much at each sitting, but has a liking to picking out what he wants in the pantry.

I apparently wasn't moving fast enough for him to get a snack ready, so he decided to hoist himself up to get closer to his food.

After playing 1,000,000 goldfish cracker pickup before school this week, I've learned to put chip clips on each bag in Noah's reach.  

We had one morning where I decided to load Noah on the back of my bike, ride up to the playground, poop him out, then head home for nap.  Well, my plan didn't play out as I had hoped.  It was more like... Noah fought and screamed as I loaded him on bike. I distracted him & got him happily up to the playground.  We were up at playground too early & the slides were still covered in dew/rain, so Noah was a soggy mess afterwards.  Noah fought & screamed as I loaded him on bike again to head home, but I pushed through it & we made it back without too much whining.  Noah was still roaring to go, so I embraced the soggy, wet clothes & we pulled out the water table.  Noah was thrilled to splash, so the morning ended in success!

His stinker face.

This week, Noah went from taking 2 naps to taking 1 nap.  Ughhh.  It has made our mornings longer, nap has interfered with when I have to pick Connor up from school, and I have very little 'free' time to get my to-do's done.  Noah's new sleep schedule though has landed a pretty set bedtime from 7:30pm- 7:30am, which is great!!  We're embracing it all & trying to find our new norm.

To wear the Monster out this AM, we dropped C off at school, and headed to a nearby park.  This kid was in heaven.

Noah wasn't a fan of getting in the swing this time (anything that looks to be confining him sets him in tantrum mode recently *swing, car seat, bike trailer, etc).  I let him just push the swing at first.  When he thought that was awesome, I tried to load him in the swing again.  Worked like a charm.  He quickly remembered how much he loved the swing.  Oh, the giggles that came from his little face!  I had a great view of all of his new teeth.

Connor starts basketball next week.  Stay tuned for pictures of my big boy in action!