So Stinkin' Cool

I wanted to do sign with my older children, but couldn't find a good resource for it. I might add, I was also too cheap to buy a book on signing. Consequently they only learned "please" "thank you" and "more" -- and later I found out I was doing "more" incorrectly. Ah well. Now, however, there's a great site on the web with some basic signs for babies, so I am trying again with my littlest.

This is just one of a whole host of things I could file under "Wish I'd Done With My First Two." I think ( I hope -- oh no...is it just me?) all parents do this. We find stuff out after the fact and then play the blame game for not being omnicient while raising our older kids. One area in which I was woefully underinformed was sleep. This book absolutely revolutionized my approach to kids and sleep and I have wondered many times whether my oldest would be a better sleeper if I'd had this book when she was a baby. I remember when she started going to bed at 9 p.m. and how elated we were not to be up until midnight anymore. We were similarly thrilled when our son started hitting the hay at around the same time. They were both about 7 months old.

Contrast that with my littlest one, who since she was 7 months old, has been going to bed at 6:30 p.m. and sleeping until about 6:30 or 7 a.m.. I am not kidding. Twelve hours of sleep, in addition to the 3.5 hours she sleeps during the day. The sleep advice in this book is so counter-intuitive, I almost dismissed it out of hand. But the good doctor was right and now peace reigns in Sleepy Valley once more. The real happy ending is that the 5 and 3 year olds go to bed at 7:30, so that's 3.5 hours of total freedom for Mommy and Daddy. The fact that we use that freedom to watch countless hours of mediocre television in no way diminishes its value.