Week in Review

Sleep Deprivation
Over the past 2 weeks or so, Kai has decided that he needs to wake up and eat again every 3-4 hours at night. I know eating can increase during growth spurts, but I don't remember those episodes lasting this long. He does appear to be teething, so that may be part of it. But by now, I wonder if it's just become a bad habit, since he was going 9-10 hours of sleep at night without eating. After all, like one of my friends here put it, if you figure out that you can wake up every 3 hours and demand and then get served pizza and ice cream, why not continue? Which I guess was her way of saying that I might want to consider letting Kai cry it out when he wakes up during the night. But then the whole house would potentially be up as well, and right now, I guess it's nice to limit the sleep deprived members of the house to Kai and me. Plus he really does seem to eat quite a bit at night. Which leads me to my other theory, which is that he really isn't eating as well during the day time right now because he is more interested in looking at what's going on around him. At night, it's just the dark room plus it's really quiet. I've tried finding quieter spots during the daytime, but with Noah around, that's pretty much impossible. On a positive sleep note, Noah has napped 4 out of 5 days this week so far, which is practically a miracle. He is a great night sleeper (12 hours solid), but has been an on and off napper since late winter/early spring. I have been getting Kai one good feeding when Noah naps, but that doesn't seem to have an effect on the nighttime situation. Thank goodness for my morning cup of coffee.

Names
Lately, Noah is into giving names to his toys. Last night, he told me that the lobster bathtub toy is named "Cricket". I've started asking him what different things name's are, because it's funny to see what pops out of his mouth. Here are George (blue duck) and Birdie (red):

Noah is very much into acting out scenes with George and Birdie and is constantly talking to them and asking them questions. "What are you looking at George? There's nothing there. Silly goose." Noah is also occasionally assigning names to characters in books, particularly if they are not named in the book. Right now, the name of choice for book characters is 'Max'.

Firsts
This week Kai for the first time went into his little entertainment station, or whatever you call these things:
He was intrigued by the various toys attached to it, but didn't really attempt to grab any of them. After a few minutes, he was much more interested in watching Noah from his new perch:

Noah for the first time this week created his own train track! So far he had only really put together a few track pieces and would push his trains back and forth. One day this week while I was tidying up the kitchen, I heard Noah making a lot of his frustration sounds. I eventually stuck my head down to peak at what he was doing, and he had gathered up all of the tracks and made a loop! He was not quite able to get the last two pieces to come together so I did have to help him with that. There was probably some luck involved with this accomplishment, but I'm sure the repetition of us making them together has also helped. Here is a picture of Noah's first loop:Playing
We went over to Katherine's house for a play date which Noah always gets excited about. They are so cute together - at some point, they always end up holding hands and walking together (not managed to capture that on a picture yet, but I hope to soon). Although parallel play is still the norm for 2 year olds, Noah and Katherine do interact quite a bit as well when they get together. Noah loves going to Katherine's house because it means he gets to raid Sam's (Katherine's brother) truck, car and train collection which is quite impressive since Sam is 5 and has had some time to let it grow. This week, poor Katherine was desperately trying to get Noah to do some arts and crafts with her but he wanted nothing to do with it. After doing some finger painting on her own, she reluctantly sat down next to Noah and started help build a train track. Eventually, she did get him to come over and play with some playdough - they ended up spending a good 20 or so minutes making playdough waffles and other food items for eachother.

Playdough Fun

Kai watches the action from the sidelines