How We Spend Our Time

Dakota is finally (as in the past month) sleeping through the night on a regular basis. She typically goes to bed around 7pm and wakes up between 5 and 6am. Sometimes I get super lucky and she sleeps later, but she’s an early bird for the most part. I like spending the very early morning with her though. She’s super happy in the morning and it’s nice quality time with just her. She’s at that age where she just seems to be picking things up left and right, too. She just figures out how to do new things all the time. Recently it’s been putting these small rings onto a peg board; the video is below.

Dakota mastering the rings.

Harper, as of this weekend, is no longer taking naps during the day. I decided that it was better for him to go to bed earlier and go right to sleep than for him to nap and then toss and turn for an hour (sometimes more) at night. He’d usually go down for nap around 1pm and sleep for 2 hours, but it just got to where he couldn’t go to sleep at night until 9:30 or 10pm and I hated making him lay in bed so long because I know how frustrating that can be. The only problem with this is that he is so tired in the middle of the day. When he naps he falls right to sleep and I usually had to wake him up, so I know he’s tired. I guess we’ll see if this works for us, and if not, I’ll try something else. Maybe a short 1 hour nap just on days when it’s absolutely necessary? I don’t know.

While I’m dropping his naptime, I’m still enforcing quiet time. He can play my iPad, watch TV, read etc. It just has to be quiet, for about an hour. Then, since Dakota’s usually asleep I spend some one on one time with him. Today we worked on writing numbers with his dry erase markers and we also found all the letters in the alphabet on the keyboard, which is what he wanted to do. I think he’ll really benefit from the one on one time since I don’t get to give that to him when Dakota’s awake. It’s also nice to be able to take him outside to play while she’s sleeping. I can help him ride his tricycle, play with the chalk or take him on the swing that he loves so much.

His favorite pastime.