Big milestones for the Little Man and the Little Miss

The Little Man

It’s been a while since I posted an update on the Little Man and now seems as good a time as any since we hit a second big milestone last night. But I’m jumping ahead. Let me go back to the first. Nearly three weeks ago, Kelly decided it was time for the Little Man to be completely potty-trained. He could do it when and if he wanted, but he was still in diapers and didn’t really have any incentive. So Kelly kept him out of school on a Thursday and Friday, giving four straight days to get it done. That Thursday, she put him into “big boy” underwear, and I am enormously pleased to say that he hasn’t used diapers since. There were little accidents along the way, but they have been few and far between. Even when he is at school, he generally does a very good job and no matter where he is, he has learned to tell someone when he needs to go.

The credit for this is divided between Kelly and the Little Man. Kelly was determined to make it happen and she endured a few difficult days to make it so. The Little Man has done his fair share, too, and now that we are coming up on nearly 3 weeks of his being diaper-free, I think we are all seeing the benefit of their efforts.

The second milestone took place last night, but requires a little back-story. Up until around the time the Little Miss was born, the Little Man would sleep happily in his room by himself. Once the Little Miss was born (which was back in August), he decided that he was missing out on the fun and no longer wanted to sleep alone. This evolved, after the first of the year, into me, sleeping on a mattress on the floor in his bedroom. Part of this was to make the Little Man happy, and part of this was because I could not sleep in our bed with the Little Miss there. After five long months of sleeping on the floor in the Little Man’s room, I finally returned to my own room and my own bed last night.

Much like his potty training, we simply picked a date that seemed sufficient, and Kelly moved my stuff out of his room and replaced it with a big floor mat that had roads and things printed on it. She took a bunch of the Little Man’s toys and made a town where my mattress used to be.

When the Little Man arrived home from school yesterday, he knew he has a surprise coming (he also knew that I was not going to be sleeping in his room; we prepared him ahead of time) and he ran excitedly up the stairs to see what it was. I think he was very happy with the result, since he played in there practically until bedtime.

Once bedtime arrived, I put the Little Man into his bed, read him Where the Wild Things Are (which is his most-requested book recently), let him watch an episode of Dinosaur Train on my iPhone and then it was time to go to sleep. He came into our room a few times to let us know he was okay or that he had to use the potty. Then I put him back to bed and sat there with him until he dozed off. He slept through the night and for the first time in more than five months, I slept in my own room and in my own bed last night.

The Little Miss

The Little Miss has had a few milestones of her own, as she turned nine months old. She says, “Da-da,” very deliberately and with such a sweet voice! She is close to saying “Ma-ma,” too, I think, but in this respect, she is opposite of the Little Man (whose first word was ma-ma.) She is opposite in another respect, too. The Little Man never crawled. He walked when he was 11 months, but he never crawled and couldn’t even turn himself over until he was 9 or 10 months old. Not so the Little Miss. She has been turning herself over for some time now. She can get in and out of the crawling position, has been crawling backwards for some week, and can haltingly crawl forwards, too.

She can also pull herself up and stand, so long as she is holding onto something. The crawling is particularly exciting because we never experienced that with the Little Man. At times, she can move pretty quickly when she crawls, but she will also, on occasion, back herself into a corner.

And so there are my updates and I even managed to condense them down to under a eight hundred words.