The people that got us through

Our topic of today is going to once again revolve around sleep issues. But we will make it more of a coffee talk topic. I need your help. What would you do if this was your child.

You have worked very hard to get your child to stop violently rocking himself to sleep. He does so quite nicely. No more fussing and falls asleep rather quickly. However, at nap time he still wakes up and you check on him only to find him rocking. He has only been sleeping for about an hour and not napped well in the past 4 days. What do you do?
a) let him continue to rock himself to sleep. (he may rock himself right off the bed)
b) put a hand on him like you do in the night, but leave him where he is. (he may wake up and rock again and rock himself off the bed)
c) move him and try to put him back to sleep like you do in the beginning (here you risk waking him up to the point of not going back to sleep)

This is the situation I was faced with this afternoon. I went with option c and that didn’t work out so well for me. I woke him up and he never went back to sleep. Oh and before you make your choice lets factor in the rest of the day. He woke up a generally happy baby and ate all of his breakfast. He began fussing shortly after breakfast when he was told no on occasion. Later in the morning he became crying psycho child at everything. He did cry when he bumped his head and accidentally shoved his straw into his mouth. For this I don’t blame him. In fact, that was a good thing. But he also cried at everything else. This isn’t just crying. This is all out wailing. The best one came when his father tried to put the video camera in the backpack so we could go for a walk. The boy needed a nap in a big kind of way.

After over 30 minutes of trying to get him to go back to sleep I finally gave up.

We did take our outing to Lenin Square this afternoon. Pickle was a perfect angel the entire time! Shocking. He walked around the square by the big church. We picked up some gifts for people here and gifts for people back home. We stopped in at the grocery store to pick up important things like coffee and creamer. This was Pickle’s first trip into a grocery. He was awestruck. He had never seen so much food. We weren’t sure what a man was saying to us when we walked in with a baby in a stroller. I thought he was saying that we couldn’t take the stroller in so we took Pickle out of the stroller. When we went into the grocery area he said something else and I returned with, “ya nee pah-nee-mai-oh.” (I don’t understand) He said something else that we figured was it was ok to take the stroller in. We opened the stroller and put Pickle back in. I still don’t know what he was saying. He very well could have been telling us not to bring a child into the store. We thought it would be ok since the quarantine was lifted today. The man was very very nice to us. I was pushing Pickle around the store and he came by and squatted down and said hello and fixed Pickle’s pant leg. He also was so nice as to hold the door open for us when we left.

I do notice as to how gentlemanly men are here. As we rode the trolley into town we watched as all the young men got up so the older women could sit down. That is something you certainly don’t see in the states.

We are still working with Pickle on family names. He now understands that CS is Daddy, but doesn’t say daddy. He still calls him papa. My mom is babada. He doesn’t even have to be prompted for that one. (sorry mom) His new person in the book is Uncle Wayne. He is Coo Coo Coo. He also recognizes the cats. They are Mau maus.

Other things we understand he is saying are car, duck, cow, rooster, pig, cup, ball, airplane, bye-bye, all done and light.

Last night we went up to Kathou and Paypay’s apartment so Pickle and Wobbles could play together. It took Pickle about 20 minutes to get comfortable. We let him bring a comfort item with him. It happened to be my comb, but hey it worked. He played quite nicely with everyone. We only had one small baby battle over a clothes pin. When Pickle had enough play time he said, “All Done” and walked to the door. CS held him in the hall and said paka paka to Kathou, Paypay and Nadya. Pickle actually said Paka too! In fact he said it all the way down the stairs and into our apartment.

He is slowly getting more comfortable around people. This is a very good thing.