Sleep

My beautiful sleeping L.  She has taken to taking naps in my arms a few times a week and I love it.  We don't really do in-her-bed naps because of potty-training...which in some ways stinks...but I think as a mother you eventually reach a point where children are just perpetually a part of life and there really aren't breaks in the afternoon, etc.  I love these little nap times.  She is so sweet...our little sleeping tornado.

I love to sleep.  I'm a person who needs about 7-8 hours of sleep.  There's nothing better to me than getting into bed, surrounded by my 3 pillows and my sweet husband cuddled behind me hugging me.  It's bliss.  I like to have the air turned down cold, mainly because Mr. N gives off a lot of heat and the air being cold makes things much more comfortable.  I love sleeping at night.  Inevitably morning comes though.  Over the last year I've started getting up earlier and earlier.  Mainly this is because I exercise, shower and read my scriptures before the girls get up.  Originally I'd get up at 6:30 and just exercise.  Then 6:00 am so I could also shower and read my scriptures.  I wasn't getting a lot of time to read though, so I pushed it back to 5:45am.  That was descent, but I still felt so rushed.  This summer I started with the 5:30 am thing and that seems to be giving me enough time without being really rushed.  Luckily I don't take long showers in the summer...it's too hot to just hang out in the shower.  Mr. N is working at his guard base this month and he gets up at 5:00 am to get going.  Having him get up at 5 and knowing I'll be up in 30 minutes made it hard to actually rest in that interval between 5 and 5:30.  Also, I figured if I got up at 5 am I could be home when Mr. N left for work.  So, now I'm up at 5:00 am.  It hasn't been too bad, though I never wanted to be that mom that wakes up at the crack of dawn to get things done.  But, it's my time and it is nice to be able to do things like update my blog in peace without doing 20 other child related things.  I love my daughters dearly, but it is nice to have me time.

 M has a serious finger sucking problem and her teeth are starting to show it a little bit.  We've tried Tabasco on her fingers, rubbing a bar of soap all over them, vinegar, band-aids,  and bitter nail polish.  She just deals with it.  She pulls band-aids off and sucks her fingers until the taste goes away.  Nice.  yesterday I decided to try something I'd been contemplating for a while...taping them with medical tape.  If there was some way I could actually get her fingers plastered I would, but I don't think there is.  The tape seems to be working pretty well.  She is very upset with us for taping her fingers and feels she is being very poorly treated.  I can understand how she would feel that way  :).  She tries to hide and pull the tape off, but it takes a lot of work to do so, so we usually can catch her before she finishes the job, and then we just retape them.  Last night Mr. N had to stay with her in bed until she was asleep because she was so determined to get the tape off and suck her fingers to sleep.  I fully expect the tape to be gone this morning.  If it's not I'll be presently surprised.  

 

2 weeks.  If we can keep it up for 2 weeks we should be able to break the habit.  I keep telling her she will appreciate it in 10 years when her teeth aren't completely ruined by a bad habit.

Here's L and her dad.  They were experimenting with self-portraits.  Notice her Snow White dress.  The girls are totally into dress-up right now.  It's very cute!