Yes, me again. Turns out I'm not so much "dedicated to blogging" as I am "jacked up on the 20 ounce bottle of Mountain Dew Voltage I drank well into the afternoon which ensures I will not be falling asleep no matter how tired my little, pea brain is right now" so I thought I'd play along for the first time with Candid Carrie's Phriday Photo Phiesta. (I can't tell if Carrie does it with "PH" or "F" and I'm a bit bleary eyed, so I'm opting for the Ph 'cause that's how I feel like rolling.) I have seen folks doing the FFF/PhPhPh before (as a matter of fact, I was just over admiring Jennifer's latest entry which is quite the amazing Christmas card!) and as I'm still awake, it seems like as good a time as any to join in the fun!
Anyhow, fresh off my belated success with the Fantabulous photo-related Christmas gift creation, here is a retrospective of Kiddo with Santa over the years............ Since I am a total Christmas nut, one of my favorite things each December is taking Kiddo, all bedecked in her holiday duds, to see the Man in Red. Enjoy!
Her first visit to Santa, age 6 months, in an outfit that one of my oldest (as in since high school, not age-wise) friends and her wife gave us. Loved the outfit, I mean, seriously, it had a velvet beret, people!!
The following December, by which point I'd scouted out all the area mall Santas and decided this one was the best of the lot (Kiddo age 18 months in case you didn't do the math):
Age 2 and a half, the bow started on top of her head but slid off to the side. It sort of looked on purpose, so I let it go. She wouldn't look at me, the mommy frantically waving as I jumped about with the camera glued to my face, because talking to Santa was much more important. They had a lengthy conversation, which I believe entailed discussing a lot of points Kiddo had picked up watching and rewatching the Wiggles Christmas DVD she wore out that year:
Age 3 and a half and looking at the camera once more:
Last year, age 4 and a half:
And for this year's picture, well you can see one of the photos from this year's session down below in my SITSmas post (it isn't the exact one we used on our card, but it's still cute which is why I put it up here)... and on that note, TGIF and I'm off to bed!
So Mondays are the kiddo's busiest day for the summer. She has "farm school" in the morning as well as a PT session, then gymnastics for an hour in the late afternoon. Usually we don't do anything strenuous in between farm school and gymnastics - maybe a trip to the library (which is right up the road from the YMCA, Mommy likes to conserve gas in these days of $70+ tank fill-ups) but usually we just chill at home until it's time to head off to the Y.
Not so today, however. My BFF (who is also the kiddo's godmother) is on vacation this week and came into town to meet up with the kiddo and me for a trip to the zoo after farm school. Now, our local zoo isn't exactly laid out in a pedestrian-friendly way. I've been to other zoos that are more friendly to the walkers, what with being laid out in a loop so you can do the whole zoo and tada, you're back where you started and can head home. Our zoo? More of a long, wiggly line than a loop. Basically you walk alllllll the way down to the farthest point of the line, 'cause that's where the elephants (and now baboons) are and how can you skip the elephants??, then you have to hike your way alllllll the way back up the path (now uphill in a couple of places to boot) to get to the parking lot. I'm not complaining much here, just saying, it's a lot of walking, especially for a kiddo. I declined to lug the wagon out of the back of the van for her, so she walked it all. (She weighs almost 36 pounds these days, so Mommy doesn't carry her for any distance anymore. Occasionally she gets a shoulder ride from Daddy, but he wasn't with us.) We followed the zoo up with a trip to Friendly's where much ice cream was consumed (*urp*) by all, then home for a briefer-than-usual relaxing and resting period before we were off to the library and gymnastics.
The kiddo was her usual insanely energetic self for gymnastics - I don't think she was still for more than 10 seconds at any given point over the hour. By the time we got home, she was wiped.
(How wiped was she?)
She was so wiped that she fell asleep in the shower.
Yes, asleep. In the shower.
She climbed rather laboriously into the shower after the world's most sluggish brushing of teeth. I left the bathroom for maybe 90 seconds to go collect her jammies (which were, of course, under the beanbag chair in the living room) and get her some fresh undies. When I returned to the bathroom, I pulled back the curtain and grabbed the shampoo bottle and this is when I noticed that she was out cold. Sitting on the floor of the shower, knees bent and head down on them, asleep. Scared the living daylights out of her when I woke her up, too. She wasn't even under the water, but it scared me a little to know that she could actually fall asleep that quickly in such a spot.
Needless to say, we had the world's fastest shower, though she rallied valiantly to stay awake through one of her new library books before falling asleep again. It was literally one of those "asleep before her head hit the pillow" moments, too. She didn't even stay awake long enough to request a lullaby...
Sweet dreams, sleepy kid!
The kiddo has, since the age of not-quite-two and a half, gone to bed at 7pm. That's 7pm at the latest, mind you - some days she'll ask to go to bed earlier and if she's had a very busy day it isn't unusual for her to be in bed closer to 6:30. Two and a half, you see, was when she decided she was done with napping and gave up her regular afternoon nap for good over a two week period and much to Mommy's chagrin. Her bedtime didn't move much earlier at that point, she'd been going to bed around 7:30 with the nap, so it didn't seem like that big a deal. Since that dark, dark period when the afternoon nap went away, the kiddo has napped maybe 10 or 12 times total, counting her nap today, either because she's under the weather or if she's way off her schedule because we're traveling or something.Now, as I've mentioned before, the kiddo has SPD. Because of this, routines are even more important for her than your average, non-SPD kid. Her evening routine for over a year now has consisted of an early bath (she's generally in the tub between 4:30 and 5:00), followed by dinner and then her bedtime routine (feed the fish, brush the teeth, potty, sensory diet, stories etc). All of that is done and her lights are out by 7pm at the latest 99% of the time.While there are some advantages to having a kid who goes to bed on the early side, there are also disadvantages, as you might imagine. The problem is that keeping her up past her bedtime for any extended length throws her out of whack for a few days thereafter. She gets very "disregulated" to use SPD parlance, and it just isn't fair to her to disrupt her already irregular system by keeping her up, even if it is for something fun like 4th of July fireworks or a party or something. Consequently, we have had to say no over the years to any number of fun activities because they would keep her out past her bedtime. We missed two preschool events just in this last week, as a matter of fact - one was a pizza night at a pizzeria she loves and the other was a school picnic held after hours at the zoo. While she would have loved both events, they didn't start until well into her evening routine and would have meant she'd have been up for a good two plus hours beyond her bedtime, and the repercussions from that would have been hard on all of us but especially would've made her miserable, so we (with regret) skipped them both.It was partially those two missed events that got me seriously considering the kiddo's bedtime, along with the fact that in recent months, she hasn't just rolled over and gone straight to sleep at lights out the way she used to, say, six months or a year ago. Recently, we can hear her talking, singing or reading stories (she has a flashlight in her bed) for at least a half hour after lights out, if not longer. Hubby and I talked about it this weekend and decided we'd try changing her schedule a bit and pushing her bedtime from 7ish to closer to 8ish. We have gone back to doing a post-dinner bath (which had been switched a while ago to a pre-dinner bath to increase cooperation and decrease some ugly meltdowns that were occurring mid-bath) so she's still eating dinner around the same time. Doing a later bath means slightly less time in the tub - with the earlier bath time she'd frequently stay in the bath for up to an hour, just playing - but not so much that she is missing out on the relaxing element of soaking in the water. So far, so good... she went down about 3 minutes ago and I can still hear her talking to her stuffed animals but she was definitely drowsy when I was singing her lullabies just now. The real test will be how much later, if any, she'll be getting up in the morning. While being up later in the evening will be good once kindergarten starts in the fall, if the bus schedule is the same as it was for the kids on our street this year, she will have less time in the mornings than she has had for getting ready, having breakfast and getting out the door. A half an hour less, to be exact, and for the kiddo, who really lollygags about and takes her own sweet time to eat breakfast, that is a major change. Once we see how the later bedtime shakes out in the morning, I'll start working on getting her up and at 'em in a more time-efficient manner, so that she is accustomed to being ready to go by the earlier time well in advance of school. I wish the bus schedule would be mailed out earlier than August, but I'd rather be prepared and then find out that she has extra time in the mornings than the other way around.So, the first big schedule change in a long time has begun. Hopefully the kiddo stays on an even keel and adjusts without major trauma...For those of you out there who read this and have kids, what time do your kids go to bed? How old were they when they gave up naps or are they still napping? I always feel like people's reaction when they hear the kiddo's bedtime is somewhere between quite surprised and absolutely shocked at how early 7pm is, so I'm wondering what a "typical" bedtime for a kindergartner is these days....?
