I know sleeping and getting our kids to sleep is hard. Right now Alex is working on negotiation his way to a later and later bedtime. Thing is, if he stays up later than 8:15 he’s cranky and unmanageable the next day. So we’re holding firm at the 8:00 hour.
When Alex was younger, we had tons of issues with getting him to stay in his own bed and ultimately resorted to my husband sleeping with him for several years. Every night he would curl up next to Alex and fall asleep with him. Sometimes he would make it back to our room, other times not so much.
Our issues ranged from Alex not getting to sleep, night terrors, waking up in the middle of the night, falling out of the bed and getting up before the butt crack of dawn. You name it, we’ve dealt with it.
One of the first things we tackled was when he was about four and we transferred him over to a big boy bed. He promptly fell out of it 1,000 times a night. If my husband wasn’t already in bed with him, he’d run screaming down to our room and we’d have to go through the whole “going to bed” routine all over again, even if it was three AM.
And we did have bed rails. He worked around them like an octopus and still fell out of bed. Each and every night. …continue reading
Jack has been in aquatic physical therapy for almost a year now. It is the most recent therapy we’ve added and we definitely see a benefit. Believe me, those angry kicks in the gut during diaper changes hurt much more now than they did a year ago!
I guess that wishing for Jack to gain more strength so that he can walk farther on his own without being carried may have back-fired on me. Just goes to show that you should be careful what you wish for…you might just get it.
I agree with Jack’s developmental pediatrician that there is no way he would have done land-based physical therapy. He’s simply all over the place. In the water, there’s only so far he can go unassisted. He now does 30 minutes weekly of land-based physical therapy at school, but I see the most benefit from the hour in the water.
The water. Jack has a love/hate relationship with the water. We’ve oscillated from periods of relative happiness with the water to months of all-out screaming, kicking, flailing, yelling, crying meltdowns that leave both Jack and this mama spent.
However, I really do not believe that the problem lies with the water itself, but rather all of the stuff that comes with the water. For example, bath time is particularly pleasant because of Jack’s intense tactile sensitivity. So, no face washing, no washcloths, and absolutely no foamy soaps. We tried introducing bath foam (it looks like shaving cream). He screamed like we were suggesting that he put his hand into boiling water. We thought, maybe it’s the color and smell of the foam (it was pink and cherry-scented)? So, we tried just good-old-fashioned (and cheap!) shaving cream. No dice, my friends. It’s just the foam. Soap can’t get too foamy or bubbly, either, or else it sets him off. …continue reading
