Logan is very attached to a tiny teddy bear these days.  He would sleep and go everywhere with it.  The only place he will not take Teddy to is school.  Logan would hand Teddy to me to put it in a safe place in the car, and I have heard him said “see you later” to Teddy on his own.  The past few days, he found Teddy a family.  Now Teddy has a Daddy Bear and Mommy Bear.  Logan has been taking the entire family to bed at night and bringing all of them to the family room in the morning.  Every night when Logan says the rollcall of his goodnights to each of us before he lays down, the bear family is now also being mentioned individually.

     Since the weather has been nicer lately, Logan is more interested to play outdoors.  His favorite outdoor toys this week have been the water gun and Stuart’s remote controlled car.  Logan is getting better controlling the car now; he can drive it forward and make turns.  He still however runs up to turn the car around manually rather than using the control to back it up . 

     As a side note, Logan’s counting skills are getting a bit better as he understands the concept of it now.  When we were at the zoo, he was counting the number of animals he saw.  But he still has trouble with the number 5 where he often replaces it with 8.  Like today when we were driving home, he made a comment that there were many cars on the road.  So I asked him to count them, and he was counting them aloud, “one, two, three, four, eight”.  After I corrected him gently, he continued on starting with “five” all the way to “twelve” correctly.  He also uses his fingers to help counting too.  When we have animal crackers for desserts sometimes, he often asked for five of them.  Stuart would mess with him by giving him less than 5, then he would use his fingers to count how many he got and how many more he should get.

It was Stuart’s birthday today.  Unfortunately, he still had to work, but he managed to play tennis with me during his lunch time.  We had fun playing and got a good workout.  We actually played 3 sets of games.  At the end, Stuart def. Bonnie 6-0, 3-6, 3-0.  I was just happy that I got one set which rarely happens.  We had Stuart’s favorite fish and chips for dinner and ice cream cake for dessert.  He also received many birthday wishes and nice gifts.  This was the simple birthday celebration Stuart was wishing for.

We just had a 3 day weekend.  The boys were off from school on Friday for spring break, so both Stuart and I took a day off from work as well.  We decided to go to SF Zoo with the Kaos on Friday.  This was the second time visiting that zoo for Logan and first for Connor.  Logan was his usual self, not too excited to see the animals.  He had his snack while looking through all the cages.  The highlight for him was the steam engine train.  He was so excited that he would run to see it and was looking forward to riding it. The ride was fast and we all enjoyed it a lot, including Connor.  For almost the entire trip, Connor was very content looking around in his stroller.  He also took an hour of comfortable nap there.  Mckayla and Marcus seemed to have a great time too; they both had their share of walking and riding in the stroller.  After 4 hours of visiting, we all were tired and the two boys took their naps on the way home.

On Saturday, we just did some errands and stayed home most of the day.  Stuart was able to use the time to clean up our backyard for our Sunday event.  We also played with our neighbors in the front yard since the weather was very nice.  Logan and Caleb had a good time practicing hiding and hunting for eggs for Easter.

We invited some of our friends and kids over on Easter Sunday for an egg hunt.   Between the few families, we had hidden over 100 eggs in our backyard.  All the kids came prepared with their baskets, and everyone was excited looking for eggs.  Logan initially was not as interested, compared to the practice run he had with Caleb.  But later on, Stuart was able to get him into the game again by using his favorite toy of the week, a water gun, to aim for eggs.  Connor was just happy sitting on a blanket holding a couple of eggs.  At the end, Brandon, Peyton, Mckayla, Marcus, Ashlyn, Tyler and Tyson were happy opening up all the eggs to see their prizes.  We then had the Hawaiian BBQ lunch we picked up, and moved on to free play time in the house and in the backyard afterward.  We also had a little early celebration for Stuart’s birthday.  Three hours of fun time had passed and it was time for all the kids to go home and take their naps.  It was a good weekend.

I took Connor to see the doctor for his 9th month visit today.  The ear that Connor had the infection was still slightly red, but that was not unusual according to the doctor.  Connor had finished the 10 days of amoxicillin a week ago.  Other than that, everything checked out well, including his lungs which sounded clear.

His new stats as below:

Wt: 24lb 12oz (95%, down from 97%)

Ht: 31.1” (99% consistently)

Head: 19”

For comparison, Logan was 20lb 12oz (51%), 30” tall and with head size 19”.

We learned from today’s visit that the boys’ doctor is leaving Kaiser in 1 month.  Dr. Chiu has been helpful and caring to our boys.  So we are sad that we have to find another doctor for them soon.

After the first night of sleep training, Connor slept through the entire night.  He must have been tired from the crying.  On day 2, he cried for 5 minutes after I put him down.  He woke up twice that night but uneventful.  Last evening, day 3, there was only 3 minutes of crying at bedtime.  However, Connor woke up many times afterward.  First time was at 10:30.  I fed him, and he started crying when I returned him to the crib.  I figured I had to continue the training, so I left after saying goodnight.  He was angry and cried for a total of 16 minutes before he stopped, but for some reason, he woke up crying again 30 minutes later.  At that point, I felt bad and went to see him.  I decided to feed him again.  He was very cute, kept looking up to stare at me, like checking to make sure I was staying with him.  He finally went back to sleep in the crib without any fuss.  However, he awoke again at 1:30, 2:30 and 4:30.  The good thing was that he was able to put himself back to sleep in just a few minutes two of those times.  Tonight, he cried probably just 10 seconds.  He had stopped even before I got hold of the monitor.  Will see how tonight goes.

Just FYI, Logan’s sleep training record was 1st night: 27mins, 2nd night: 17mins, 3rd night: NO cry at all and 7mins before falling asleep

     After recovering from the past illness, Connor has returned to sleeping better again, sometimes only waking up once each night.  But the last 4 nights, for some reasons, he was waking up often.  He just wanted to be held, sometimes it would take a few tries before I could put him back to the crib.  So I decided that it was time for sleep training as it would be good for him to learn to sleep on his own.  We had set the date to be today on Friday.  However, I have been dreading for tonight to come.  I was not looking forward to making my happy Connor cried.

     Tonight after the bedtime routine, Connor fell asleep as usual while being fed by me.  When he was done, I decided to brush his teeth to sort of wake him up.  He was quite drowsy but not totally asleep when I placed him in the crib.  As soon as he realized where he was, he started to cry.  I said my good night quickly and left the room.  He continued to cry loudly.  He rolled back and forth a bit in the crib, but not rolling over.  I was watching him on the monitor and listening to him.  His cry was so sad that I could not handle it anymore, so I was doing dishes to distract myself.  At 10 minute mark, I went into the room to quickly tell him that it was ok and he should go to sleep.  Connor stopped crying when he heard me come in; his face was so sad and was begging for help.  But as soon as I walked away from his crib, his sad cry began again.  At 14 minutes, he took a couple of 30 seconds pauses.  Then finally fell asleep at 16th minute.  I was relieved since I might not able to take too much longer of that sad cry. 

     We trained Logan when he was almost 8 months old and it took 27 minutes on the first night of training.  I remembered it was hard listening to Logan’s cry too, but it seemed harder this time.  Maybe because Connor is such a good boy, always smiling through and dealing with everything, that I feel worse putting him through this.