I No Longer Dread Bedtime!

Okay, so I started this post back in mid-February, but I forgot to finish it.  Here is what I wrote back then...

Coulson finally will go to sleep without a huge fight!  I used to dread putting him to bed at night, and some days trying to get him to take a nap was just a joke.  I know they say to get babies on a wake-sleep-eat schedule so they don't use food as a sleep prop, but when Coulson was first born it was literally impossible to keep him awake while feeding him, and when he got tired he got mad and the only way to calm him down so he could sleep was feeding him, so I got in the habit of feeding him to sleep.  And it didn't help that when he woke up in the middle of the night, if I fed him back to sleep then he stayed asleep longer so I got more sleep than if I tried to just give him back his pacifier, which would fall out and wake him up again quite soon thereafter.  I didn't even realize until it was too late how extremely dependent he had become on nursing to get back to sleep at night.  He almost always woke up screaming inconsolably, even after naps.  During the day I could take him outside for a short walk to calm him down, but at night all I could do was nurse him (plus, a walk woke him up, which was definitely not the goal at 3:00 a.m.).

And here is my attempt to finish this post...

When I realized that I had a huge problem on my hands, I tried several things to fix it.  I tried putting him down drowsy but awake, but he would startle and freak out as I bent over to lay him down.  I tried giving him a bottle of breast milk to fall asleep to even though I knew I wasn't supposed to, but that only helped a couple times anyway.  I tried making him cry it out but I would give up after like 10 minutes (and no, checking on him didn't help -- it made it worse).  I tried using a hand on his tummy to rock him back and forth until he fell asleep, and that made him go to sleep calmly but didn't help him learn to go to sleep on his own, so he still woke up a few times a night and I had to nurse him back to sleep those times.

Eventually, I couldn't take it anymore and tried just letting him cry himself to sleep no matter how long it took.  Unfortunately, Chrisser couldn't quite take it and would go in and rock him to sleep after about 20 minutes.  So I switched to making him cry it out for naps while Chrisser was gone.  For a while he just screamed for an hour and then I got him up and he didn't get a nap (it was a rough couple of weeks...), but one time he finally did fall asleep on his own after about a half hour.  That seemed to be a turning point for him.  He still fought it and screamed himself to sleep for a few days, but at least he went to sleep on his own now.  And after a while of that he would just scream for about 5 minutes and then calm down and go to sleep.

Then one day (Feb. 12, to be exact) I put him in bed for the night, said "I love you! Nigh-night!" and left, and he just went to sleep!  No fussing!  No screaming!  No waking up!  My inner self was singing the Hallelujah Chorus all night :)

There have been several nights since then that he's woken up a couple hours after going to bed, but there have only been 2 times that I can think of that we've had to go back in to calm him down.  He usually just fusses for about 5 minutes and then goes back to sleep.  Also, in the last couple of weeks he has started fighting going to sleep again (aka crying and sitting up as soon as I lay him down), but I just say "nigh-night" and leave anyway and he still goes to sleep by himself after a bit.

HALLELUJAH!

Also, side note that I couldn't find a good place for in the above paragraphs, somewhere during that time we started being more consistent with our bedtime routine:  Put on his pajamas, read scriptures, say prayer, brush his teeth, sing a lullaby, and go to bed.  I'm sure that consistency helped him be willing to go to sleep as well.

Halloween 2015

I've really been failing at this blog thing lately, but that's largely because we have our vlog now, which kind of serves the same purpose.  So at least our lives are still getting recorded somewhere.  But I keep telling myself I should still try to keep up the blog, so here is a quick post about Halloween!

We went with an Aladdin theme this year, with Coulson being Aladdin, me being Princess Jasmine, and Chrisser being Carpet.

I had intended to actually make myself a costume with the poofy pants, etc., but I didn't have time after Chrisser's, haha.  His took forever.  It wasn't hard, but it was very time consuming since all of the red and yellow pieces are hand sewn onto the background.  But mine worked out pretty well considering.  The shirt and skirt are actually dance practice clothes that I've had for a few years and the jewelry I just made from cereal boxes.  Coulson's was pretty easy and I was able to just use some fabric we already had for the vest and the pants.  The onesie has a design on the front, but we just put it on him backwards, haha.  And to finish it off we had a little toy Abu that Chrisser has had since he was Aladdin for Halloween when he was like 5 or 6 :).  We tied Abu to Coulson's vest so we wouldn't lose him.

As far as festivities, we went to the dance lab on Thursday (which is where the above picture was taken) and a ward party on Friday.  Chrisser wore his costume to the animation lab on Saturday, and we also wore them grocery shopping that evening.  We had one group of trick-or-treaters come, which was kinda fun.  We weren't really expecting anybody since we only have 2 or 3 kids in our ward who are old enough to eat candy and I think they went with relatives in a different neighborhood, but the group that did come looked like they were about 11-13 years old, so I guess they just came here because they could hit a ton of apartments in a short amount of time.

The ward party was mostly just a dinner, but they also had bought a ton of pumpkins intending for people to carve them at the party.  It was really cold outside so I don't think very many people actually carved one (though a few people brought one inside to carve once a lot of people had left so it wasn't so crowded), so there were a ton of leftover pumpkins.  So even though we didn't really have time to carve them, I took a couple and ended up painting them.

Had to stick with the theme :).  I think I might try my hand at baking with them this year if I have time.  I've never tried cooking a pumpkin myself before.  I've always used the canned stuff on those rare occasions when I have made something with pumpkin.  So that will be an adventure!

Picture Overload!

I'm just going to dump a whole bunch of pictures on you in this post, so get ready!

First up is a couple of pictures we took of Coulson on the 4th of July.

We didn't take any other pictures of us that day, but we did make a nice long vlog if you want to watch that.  It's like a half-hour long, though, so I won't be offended if you don't.

Lately Coulson has been trying really hard to sit up, so I've been sitting him in the Boppy pillow even though the tag says to do that around 6 months.  Coulson really enjoys it because he much prefers sitting to lying down.  I do have to prop him back up every few seconds, but whatever.

"Oh sorry, I think I blinked!"

Earlier this week we borrowed a DSLR camera from the library again.  Before I got around to Coulson's official photoshoot, I played around with the camera a bit to remember how to use it.

We got the camera this week because Chrisser's little brother was in town for a camp at BYU, so we had him take some family photos for us.

And we had fun taking pictures of each other, too.

Then I got to play with the camera for a couple of days doing a photoshoot of Coulson.

Behind the Scenes

That one of him sleeping with the ball is so great, because I didn't even pose him like that!  I had him sitting in the Boppy while I took a break and the ball was just kind of next to him.  He ended up slumping over to the side and eventually falling asleep.  A couple minutes after falling asleep, he fell a little further so he wasn't on the Boppy at all anymore and just happened to be cuddling the ball.  So I carefully moved the Boppy out of the way and snapped this picture :).  Here's one I snapped shortly before he fell asleep.

I decided to take a couple of detail shots and make a collage of the baseball pictures.

And, of course, I had to take some BYU themed pics!

And I took a couple of plain pictures just because.  I wish I had draped the sheet over his chair in such a way that it wouldn't have left that line where his chair ended, but oh well.

I Guess We're Vloggers Now

Chrisser and I started a vlog a few weeks ago.  If you don't know what that is, the word comes from "video blog," and it's basically just videos of our lives on YouTube.  We have been watching the Shaytards vlogs for several months (they are a family that has been vlogging for over 6 years and basically invented it; ok, maybe not invented, I don't know, but they made it popular).  Over time we became very drawn to the idea of having those videos there for the sake of remembering our lives and our kids' childhood.  And more than that, for some reason unknown to us we felt like we should start a vlog on YouTube, not just take a bunch of home videos and keep them for ourselves.  Weird, I know, but whatever.  In case you are interested, here is a link to our channel:

The Alvarai

We call it The Alvarai because we decided that should be the plural of Alvarez, since Alvarezes sounds and looks kind of awkward.  We are planning to upload a video every Saturday, and we currently have 3 videos up.  Enjoy!

1 Month

There isn't much to say about a 1-month-old.  He pretty much still just sleeps, eats, poops and stares around.  But I wanted to post these pictures that I took that show how much he's grown.

I hadn't realized he was that much bigger!  I measured him myself a couple days before taking the 1 month picture (I'm not a doctor, but it's gotta be pretty close, right?) and he was 22.5 inches and 10 lbs 9 oz.  As opposed to his birth stats of 21 inches (though we think he was actually a bit shorter) and 8 lbs 9 oz.