Birthday Books and Crystals

April 30

It was a fun, relaxing morning spent playing with new birthday toys. We’ve been having a hard time lately with sleep. We do have general bedtimes for the kids, so we aren’t like radical unschoolers in that sense, but they are pretty flexible. With Steve needing to get up near six thirty every morning for work, and our need to have a least some alone time together each night, we need to have fairly predictable sleep times to guarantee our energy throughout the day. Plus, with our kids, there is no way we could go to sleep with two year olds (now three!) running around the house.

They’ve been very unpredictable with their naps, more often than not, not taking one at all. This Saturday, for example, they were up 5:45, had no nap, and then stayed up until 9:30. We had no stop action the whole day, though. Once this week, Alexa was up 5:30, had no nap and stayed up until 8:00. Another day Jared did the same. It seems they need about ten hours of sleep within a twenty-four hour period. And this is a few months before turning three. If they do sleep for an hour, they jump out of their beds, running and screaming throughout the house and no type of punishment will keep them there. Besides, how can a parent make a child go to sleep with he/she is not sleepy?

I’d rather they not take a nap and go to sleep by 8:00 (since they won’t’ really sleep in past 6:30 at the latest anymore now), then take an hour nap and then stay up til almost 10:00. Anyway, the point of the above rant is that instead of jumping on top of us to wake us up in the morning, they went in the living room to play with their new toys and let us sleep a little more.

We were going to go to story hour at the library but stayed home instead since they wanted me to read them most of their new books. Here are some of the titles we read: Swam Angel by Anne Isaacs, The Berenstain Bears and the Mansion Mystery, Richard Scarry’s Best Mother Goose Ever, The Picture Book of Thomas Jefferson by David A. Adler, A Picture Book of Davy Crockett by David A. Adler, Sophie and Lou by Petra Mathers, Town Mouse Country Mouse by Jan Brett, Robin Hood and the Great Coach Robbery, Animal Babies by Harry McNaught, Theodore Mouse Goes to Sea (A Little Golden Book), Henry and Mudge and Annie’s Good Move, Harriet’s Recital by Nancy Carlson, Where is Gah-ning by Robert Munsch, The Flying Horse: The Story of Pegasus by Jane B. Mason, The House on East 88th Street by Bernard Waber, and Arthur’s Family Vacation.

Before lunch we stopped at two libraries and picked up some more materials. While they eat their lunch, I usually read stories. Besides some more of their birthday books, I also read Energy Makes Things Happen (a stage two book in the series Lets Read and Find Out Science), A Child’s Book of Art where they love to search for different things in the pictures, sort of like I Spy books, and the Magic Schoolbus’s Show and Tell.

After lunch we made some soft crystals with their science kit. Alexa seemed to like this more than Jared. It was hard to keep them from wanting to eat the crystals; however once they were soaked in the water, as they seem the consistency of jello. They mainly just played with a lot of their new birthday presents. It’s been so cold and rainy lately. I’ve felt so bad for not taking outside at all this week, since Jared especially needs a lot of big physical movement. They just had to satisfy themselves with jumping on the bed and couch and running up and down the stairs all day. Hopefully, we can go to the zoo tomorrow. Since they took a nap this afternoon, they would not stay in their beds when we tried to lay them down this evening and wound up watching most of Snow Buddies and going to bed around 9:00, although Jared kept waking up crying so it was closer to quarter to ten til he fell asleep.