Weekly Round-up

This was another good week for our family. We continued to use our schedule, although admittedly I was not as strict with it this week.

Nathan
Nathan continued with his tracing book this week. He still loves it and is getting into more and more complicated lines. He seems to be less enamoured with puzzles lately, although we did wake up to him having finished one while we slept this morning.

His potty training took one step forward and one step back this week. He started on Wednesday telling me when he would have to pee. This saves countless trips to the bathroom every day! I still make sure he sits before his independent play time, before rest time, before bed, and before we leave the house, but other than that he tells me if he has to go. The step backward is that he will not poop on the potty anymore. He pretty much only goes in his diaper first thing in the morning. I think the best solution for that will be to switch to underwear at night. He generally wakes up dry in the morning so I think he's ready for it ... I'm just not sure I am! I think we'll wait about a week and then start with that.

Nathan sleeps during about half his rest times at the moment. I really thought he was done with naps, but I'm glad I was wrong. This week he ripped up a book during one of his rest times ... as a result all books have been removed from his room for the time being.

Hannah
Hannah completely weaned herself from the bottle this week. She is now drinking a full straw cup of milk at lunch and one at supper, so she is getting enough milk. She still has her soother and likely will for a while. She seems to rely on it quite a bit.

Now that her night sleep is back to normal, I tried her in cloth diapers at night. I had tried about a month ago, but it was in the middle of her teething / ear infection / flu bit and I couldn't be sure if she was waking from one of those things or from the diaper. So far so good with the diapers at night. I'm so excited to be using all cloth except for when we travel!

I've mentioned before that Hannah did not enjoy standing ... at all. She seems to have changed her mind this week. On Friday she just decided that she was going to start wanting to stand and will even try to walk if I hold her hands. I am so excited about this development and will probably focus lots of energy helping her learn to walk independently!

We tried sitting Hannah on a toy car she got for her birthday yesterday and to our surprise, this is what happened!



She loved pushing herself around and chasing Nathan on the car. So much fun.

Peter hired a babysitter and we went out to dinner and movie Friday night. We hadn't gone out without the kids since February, so it was very nice to have some couple time! We saw The Bounty Hunter, and it was actually much better than I expected. The theatre here in our small town is brand-new and it's so cheap compared to going in the city - it cost us $25 for two tickets, a large popcorn, and two pops!

Goals
My housekeeping skills have been pretty good for the last month. For some reason I've been able to keep the house presentable pretty much all the time. I'm not sure what the difference has been but I hope it sticks around! One thing that wasn't working is the cleaning schedule I outlined here. I tried to think about why it wasn't working and I think it's because I had to be all over the house every day for my cleaning. With the kids it's nice to be able to focus on one area so the kids can stay in one spot while I work. So, I decided to make up my own schedule that has me focus on one (or sometimes a few) room(s) per day. Once I see how well it work I'll post what I'm doing :) I did manage to follow the schedule for Thursday and Friday, though, and it seemed good.

As far as the money goal goes, we spent little except for a deal we got yesterday (post to follow in a few days). Since it will save money in the long run I'm pretty happy with that.

I'm going to work with Hannah on her walking for this week.

Happy Mother's Day!