Hellobee

Charlie turned 3 years old this month! Since he’s hit all of his big milestones, this will be my last monthly update for him. But I’ll still pop in with Charlie stories when they’re relevant to parenting! A lot of things have actually been happening in his little life lately, from sleep to behavior and everything in between. We’ve made a lot of changes in the past month to address those issues, and I think it might be helpful if you’re struggling with some of the same problems!

Charlie getting a haircut at a local barber shop.

Naps

For the past couple of months, getting Charlie down for naps has been a challenge, even though he is the best napper out of all the kids at daycare. It’s quite common for kids to nap and behave much better at daycare than at home because they misbehave with the people they’re most comfortable with. We knew he still needed his nap because he’d usually melt down around bedtime whenever he skipped a nap. We’d resorted to stroller napping him every weekend for the past month, but even that stopped working recently. So we instituted quiet time every afternoon over the holiday break. He doesn’t have to take a nap, but he does have to play quietly in his room for an hour. Amazingly he stays in there, even though he protests quiet time every day. He’s napped twice, but most of the time he doesn’t. So what does he do in that hour? We can watch him on the video monitor (which has a great scroll feature), and he does puzzles, reads books, and random things like putting three shirts on top of one another.

So far it’s been working great. He hasn’t melted down since we instituted quiet time, I think because he has a chance to play calmly and quietly and reset. His bedtime is also earlier — between 7:00 – 7:30 –because he’s more tired without a nap. I can’t say that I don’t miss his 3-4 hour monster naps because that afternoon break sure was great, but at least the nap battles and overtired meltdowns have ceased. I’m sure he’ll still continue to nap well at daycare, and will fall asleep in the stroller if we’re out and about and he’s tired, but I think his daytime naps at home may largely be a thing of the past now. He’s just too busy to want to stop playing to take a nap. The up side is we’re not burned out from bedtime battles anymore, and our nights are now freeeeee (to work that is!)!

Bedtime

While we were battling naps, bedtime was also often a challenge. Charlie would make excuses to extend the bedtime routine most nights, saying  he was hungry, he wasn’t tired, he needed to use the potty… and most of the time he’d actually poop so what could we do! He’d come out of his room multiple times. He’d turn on his bedroom light after we left (so we put a childproof lock on his light switch which has worked great). But Mr. Bee recently started leaving Charlie’s bedroom door wide open, and bedtime has consistently been good since. He stays in his room after stories, and falls asleep on his own even though he can hear us cleaning up and chatting. Bedtime has been an up and down battle for pretty much the entire past year, especially after we transitioned to a toddler bed, and hopefully we’ve finally nipped it in the bud!

Behavior

The past two months have been very challenging, at times, when it comes to Charlie’s behavior. I think we escaped the Terrible Twos relatively unscathed. We didn’t do time outs, we really listened and empathized with Charlie, and we practiced positive parenting. For the most part, Charlie was well behaved, and the occasional tantrums he had (1-2 times a week) were usually the result of being overtired or hungry. But recently Charlie started throwing frequent tantrums (several times a day), throwing tantrums as soon as he woke up for absolutely no reason, being defiant, and simply not listening to us. My mom visited recently, and she noticed the change in Charlie’s behavior since the last time she saw him three months ago. I feared that the Terrible Threes were upon us, which are supposed to be much, much worse than the Terrible Twos!

When the problems first started, I suspected that Charlie might have a sleep deficit. A sleep deficit of just an hour a day over a couple of days can have an impact on behavior, and Charlie’s bedtime had been an hour or two later for some time since he would fight bedtime so much. So we got super strict with following a morning and night time routine chart, and tried moving bedtime earlier by 15 minutes at a time until he was sleeping by 8pm at the latest.

That didn’t have much impact so we asked Dr. Tom (a clinical child psychologist) for some advice. He told us to use our actions instead of our words when it came to dealing with any behavioral and sleep issues. As your child becomes increasingly verbal, I think the natural instinct is to try to explain things to them and reason with them. But you often can’t reason with a 3 year old, so it can be much more powerful to focus on how your actions are training your child.  For instance, Charlie would run around after his bath, and we’d keep coming in his room telling him to go to sleep. He loved the attention and we trained him to misbehave by continuing to pay attention to him every night. So we changed our actions — if Charlie didn’t put on his pj’s/brush his teeth/etc., we’d tell him that we’d leave the room and immediately follow through. He stopped his bedtime shenanigans because he didn’t want us to leave. Changing our actions changed his actions. Charlie listens to us much better now!

That was a helpful tool in our parenting toolkit, but we were still dealing with tantrums and defiance issues.

We implemented a rewards chart a month and a half ago to help with Charlie’s behavioral issues, but it didn’t work that well so we put it to the side for a while. He simply wasn’t interested in the rewards, which was a toy of his choice for good behavior. In fact rewards haven’t worked well for Charlie in general whether it’s praise, stickers, toys, going out, candy, videos, etc. The boy is hard to bribe! For example, I recently told Charlie that if he didn’t clean up his blocks after playing with them, I’d give them to a little boy who didn’t get any presents for Christmas. Charlie not only told me to take his blocks, but also told me to give away a slew of other toys as well. Whenever I tell him that I’m going to donate his toys, he doesn’t care when I bag them up, and even helps me do it!

We still decided to give the rewards chart another try because I really want to blog about it — I think it can be a very effective tool for most parents. Hopefully this time around it works. We’ve been using it for the past couple of days, and he still doesn’t care too much about the rewards, whatever they may be. The past couple of days he has been exceptionally well behaved however — perhaps it’s because we instituted quiet time and bedtime has been going seamlessly.

One big change we made over the holiday break was to institute a schedule, similar to daycare, so that Charlie has a general idea of what to expect each day. From art time to outdoor time to education time, we’ve been planning out our entire day ahead of time. Children thrive on consistency, and I think this will have a big impact on his behavior. Since we’re spending a lot more time indoors anyway because it’s so cold out, it actually makes our days much more fun to have planned activities each day. I have a big post on all this coming up because so far, so good!

Eating

I think eating will always be a challenge with Charlie and he has his days where he hardly eats anything at all, but he continues to eat better than he ever has since we went gluten-free and started using the Innobaby Bus Platter. He actually says he’s hungry sometimes, which is something he never used to do. Just yesterday he ate a huge breakfast, a big lunch, a huge snack, a light dinner, and another huge snack after dinner. It’s the most he’s ever eaten in a single day in his life!

We recently gifted a play market that he adores to Charlie’s daycare, and because he’s been learning about all kinds of different vegetables, I think it has helped him be more interested in trying new foods. Books about fussy eaters like I Will Never Not Eat a Tomato also seem to help (especially since the main character’s name is Charlie!).

Puzzles

Charlie is obsessed with puzzles lately and we have so much to say about them, there are 2 posts forthcoming! Charlie can spend several hours a day every day on puzzles! He asks for help with the 60 piece puzzles we bought over the weekend, but I think he can do them on his own. He just likes us to sit with him when he does puzzles…. and most things in general. As a first child, he is much needier and dependent on us than Olive, who is used to being much more independent as a second child.

Charlie has always loved getting his hair cut. Here he’s watching Thomas the Tank Engine on my iPhone — a surefire way to get him to sit still for just about anything.

Talking

As much as he cracks me up, I do miss the days when Charlie was under 2 because sometimes I get tired of answering his million why questions. He is such a chatterbox! His ability to recount something he’s heard once is pretty uncanny. His memory is better than mine (although that’s not saying much).

Here are a couple of his recent sayings:

Charlie: Daddy you’re nice to me but I’m not nice to you. How does that make you feel?

****

Charlie: (touches my stomach, 14 months postpartum) Mommy, is there a baby in there?

****

Charlie: (coughs weakly) I think that I’m sick Daddy.
Mr. Bee: Oh ok. Then we’ll stay home today. We won’t go to the library, the playground or the bookstore.
Charlie: (thinks about it) I think that I feel better now, Daddy.

****

Charlie: Olive, you’re dirty, yucky, crazy, cute!

****

Me: Charlie! (after he’s being naughty) I need a Charlie-cation!
Charlie: What kind of -cation do I need mama? Do I need a mama-cation?

My Little Boy

Charlie has been going through a mama phase lately, and when it’s just the two of us, we have so much fun! He is such a sweet boy, not just to us, but to his teachers and friends. He is constantly saying I love you and giving copious hugs and kisses. He has a big personality, but is usually a little shy in new situations. He gets along so well with Olive. He is so earnest! I think he’s pretty smart (objectively ;)). It’s truly incredible to think about how much he’s grown, learned, and changed in the past year, and his life has only just begun! What a privilege it is to watch him grow up and become his own person. I truly do feel lucky to be his mama every single day.

I thought it would be fun to do one of these interviews each year with Charlie and see how his answers change from year to year!

What is your favorite color? Blue.

What is your favorite toy? yellow doggie

What is your favorite fruit? (Asian) pear

What is your favorite vegetable? pickles