Red letter day!

Today is the day that...

• Rip figured out how that he can purposefully butt-scoot across entire rooms to a destination! It's a little awkward (he bends forward as though he might be wanting to crawl, but keeps one foot bent underneath him in the vicinity of his bellybutton), but it works. It's like the "mobility" switch finally got flipped and he realized that he can move under his own power! After spending the early morning scooting down the hallway and across rooms making a gleeful marauding baby face while maniacally laughing (think a very triumphant Beavis-y "HUH! HUH! HUNH!"), he had an over three hour nap after being awake for a mere two hours.
  • Developmental milestones are exhausting.
    • not that butt-scooting is a developmental milestone.
• Jolly finished the cutting/pasting/stickering portion of his "Let's Create" activity book, finishing with a very triumphant cutting of circles and rounded rectangles and cutting many legs to make cephalopods dance. We have maybe another handful of pages of the writing section, a few number recognition pages... and pretty much the entire coloring/drawing section. Since the coloring section is at the beginning and it's in many ways the most rudimentary, I am thinking that we might just be ready to move on to the "Let's Get Ready" and accept that my child really dislikes coloring or drawing things.
• Jolly got to push the levers on the garbage truck to smash the trash! Like, the REAL garbage truck, with 20,000 lbs of trash in it! Both levers! All by himself! This is perhaps not quite his plan for the future (he is very clear that he, Jolly, is going to DRIVE the garbage truck and that Rip is going to be in the back putting the trash in), it was still super duper exciting! (I, Guinevere, will get to drive the recycling truck, and Ephiny will get to put the recyclables in the back, apparently.)
• In the afternoon, Rip debuted the round-and-round butt-scoot... sort of like his big brother's sit and spin, without the sit and spin needed. Queue more gleeful cackling. He then ate half a sandwich, five faux-chicken nuggets (to his big brother's one) and had a 2.75 hr nap. Busy day! (And did I mention that today was a day that he slept in until 7 am? And that the naps totalled 6 hrs? Red letter day for EVERYONE.)

We're also trying different strategies for keeping Jolly from waking us up in the middle of the night requesting to be reblanketed. (After all, it's a little sad when the baby is sleeping like a rock through the night while the preschool-age child is requiring that his blanket be adjusted every few hours.) We've tried sleep sacks, but the big kid sleepsacks have foot holes and then he complains that his feet, though sock-clad, are cold and need to be reinserted into the sleepsack by parents at about 2 am and 4 am. We are now trying the fleecy blanket sleepers in the warm weather instead of blankets. The boys MATCH in their construction print fleecy sleepers (thank you, Costco!), so it's cute in addition to fully enveloping them in fleece in an inescapable way so that Jolly really has no way to extricate himself. Thus far, Jolly delivered a "My hands are cold!" complaint en route to falling asleep, but this is patently a transparent stalling tactic. Wish us luck!