clouds say "boom"

There were plenty of hot muggy days and the other days were thunder storms. Paela informs us that clouds say "boom" in the night; apparently they wake Aderyn as well. Aderyn, at times, can be a very sensitive sleeper. However, we have found that Aderyn is at the age she wants to put herself to sleep. We give her a pacifier and lay her down in her crib and she does the rest. This means she does a better job in the night, even though we are still at three (ten minute or less) wakings. But, no longer do we have two hour wake periods at one in the morning.

We also were faced with a tough predicament on how to teach Aderyn to fall asleep on her own with Paela in the same room. One would wake up the other and then vice versa, so we split the two up. I took down the crib and put it back together in our room. There wasn't much room left in our room, but at least sleep training has worked. And then came the nightmares.

In case you have forgotten, Paela fell down a flight of stairs last week. While there was no lasting damage, her nightmare count at night rose by 3x -- provoking us into moving our entire bed into Paela's room. The plan was to comfort her better by being in the same room as her, but I'm not sure it had the intended effect. We're moving our bed back tonight. After a week of hobbling around, Paela has started to walk full time.

We visited the farm again this week. While we were in the goat house, a wandering chicken strolled through. Paela wanted to catch it -- she has been talking about holding a baby chicken for weeks now -- but the free range chicken evaded her without much difficulty. However, right outside the chicken coop, one of the farm staff was holding a chicken in her hands and offered Paela a chance to pet it. She refused (on account of a stranger talking to her).

Aderyn is getting better about getting up on her knees, but hasn't taken any movement steps beyond that. However, she's completely under the belief that she is able to walk like the rest of us. She climbs up our legs, holds our fingers and begins to walk -- dragging us with.

We attempted to spring clean. Not that this is, of itself, an interesting action. But that we did a mass panicked rush to deep cleanse our kitchen of any food particle in preparation for summer ants between two little girls' nap times... was a bit comical. And even though Paela took her turn "drying" things off, we still only managed to get the most important areas cleaned and put back together before Aderyn needed us.