Sunday, February 7, 2010

This weekend

1. The girls ate four and a half ice cream sandwiches for dessert last night.

2. Allie brought some princess dress-up clothes over to me and told me that she wanted to be "Cinder White."

3. The following conversation took place:

Allie: "I'm trying to find the doctor in the book."

Mommy: "Allie are you going to marry a doctor when you grow up?"

Emily: "I'm going to marry a doctor."

Anna: "I'm going to marry Mommy."

4. Rich cleared out the guest bedroom and then moved Anna's bed in. Yes, it is official. The girls have separate bedrooms. The rooms are completely undecorated and boring but functional. Allie and Em actually took naps today after we shut their doors to keep distractions to a minimum. We had a gate in Anna's doorway to keep her in. I didn't want to shut her door because I didn't have another monitor to listen in. She stood at the gate the entire nap time.

5. The sleep situation really isn't that bad, especially considering other stories that I've read. It's not like they are up running around all night. Unfortunately, it appears that Allie and Anna both have their molars coming in and Allie has had a bad stuffy nose for the past three days. She just finished her antibiotics on Friday so this should just be a cold and nothing more but it is disrupting her sleep.

I do have to say that the most dramatic story I have ever read regarding triplets and toddler bed conversions was over at my favorite triplet message board. This was so long ago (two years, maybe) that I can't recall if it was an actual thread there or a link to a blog but the triplet parents had to remove everything from the kids' room except for the three toddler beds. There was wood over the windows because the kids would tear apart any curtains or shades and I think that they had even cracked the glass in one of the windows.

So, yeah, I don't think that we have it that bad. Although, I have come to realize that, unfortunately, my kids are on the low end of sleep requirements. You know those things that you read that say, "Kids this age need, on average, between 12 to 14 hours of sleep a day." That's an average and my girls are at about an 11. I'm at about a 12.

6. The following conversation took place today after nap:

Emily: "Mommy, I need to go to my bed."

Mommy: "You need to go to your bed?"

Emily: "Yeah. I need some sleep."

I am at a point too where I would like to just eliminate naps because when they do nap, it takes them FOREVER to fall asleep at night. Em today napped for maybe an hour. She did not fall asleep tonight until after 9:00 AND she was acting all tired this afternoon. Anna did not nap today and she was asleep within ten minutes.

4 comments:

The Super Bean said...

OMG, Cinder White? That is the cutest thing I've ever heard!!

Anonymous said...

We eliminated naps when my boy/girl twins were just about 3. It wasn't worth the fight to get them to nap anymore. We started putting them to bed at about 10 to seven. They would be asleep in 5 minutes (instead of an hour and a half) and sleep until about 7am.

We replaced nap time with "quiet time"......blankies on the couch with a book or watch a movie. It took them about a week to adjust to the new schedule (they were a little tired/crabby late in the day), but after that it worked really well for us.

SarahMarie said...

For me, it was easier to eliminate nap time once my oldest turned 3, since otherwise he would be up half the night. It does make for a crabby evening on the days where he gets up early, but you get used to it.

Jen said...

My kids are also on the low end of sleep requirements. I wish I was. We also had to drop naps early, because it became such a frustrating time for me and rarely resulted in a nap, and it wasn't worth the stress.

Very early bedtimes work better for us, as our kids wake up very early regardless of their bedtime.

We do "rest time" in the afternoon, like Anonymous posted. The tv or a movie is on, and kids have to be sitting or laying down or I make them go to another part of the house. Depending on how tired they are, this starts between 1 and 2:30 and lasts until 4 at the latest.

Once people are no longer sitting quietly and relaxing, I take away pacifiers or blankies, and the tv goes off.