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- Well – it’s official! Our big boy is now an even bigger boy because he’s moved out of his crib and into a big kid bed!
Leander has been an incredible sleeper ever since he was about 5 months old (up to that point he was a horrible sleeper, but we did an online sleep training course and it literally changed our lives). Since we had such smashing success with the sleep trainer – we followed her advice through the 2-1 nap transition, when we dropped Leander’s afternoon nap, and we were up to the “when to move our kid out of the crib” step (she suggests waiting until kids are at least 3 years old).
Well, Leander is 3 years old (he’ll be 4 in two months) and he has been perfectly content to continue to sleep in his crib. He’s never tried to climb out, he’s never complained about it – it’s “his bed” and his safe space and he loves it.
I knew it was time to make the transition though (especially with our potty training success – I wanted to make it easier on him to get up in the middle of the night and go to the potty if he needed to). We visited Derrick’s parents last weekend and all weekend he slept in a toddler bed there – so I knew, he was ready.
Plus, we’ve officially entered the roller coaster riding “off season” (meaning, we aren’t traveling as much) and with the Lake House is being closed up for the winter – it’s time to be home and it seemed like the perfect time to make the change.
So, on Monday, we took his crib down and put up his big kid bed. He instantly loved it. You could just see how proud he was of his new and improved sleeping arrangements!
And he’s done AMAZING all week! He only got out of bed one time (and I honestly think it was due to a certain big sister’s influence). He has woken up a bit earlier than usual, but he slept until his normal 7am yesterday morning – so I think it’s all just working through the “newness” and getting back to our normal. I’m so proud of our little man! - Speaking of which – Leander has officially been riding the “potty training success train” for a month now! At what point do I consider us out of “training” mode and simply “potty trained”? Because – we’re there. And I could not be happier.
- I finally hit 100 subscribers on my YouTube channel this week!! What a long hard battle that has been – but it is SO exciting to finally hit that milestone!! (Now, if I could just get through these next few weeks of weddings, engagement sessions, and mini session editing – I could get back to creating YouTube content!)
- Speaking of YouTube – Derrick is creating a new YouTube project for his channel (and I’m helping him with it)! It’s exciting and will be coming out soon – stay tuned!
- We finally got our sweet pup into our regular vet yesterday. She got mysteriously sick last week – all of a sudden on Thursday night she was super lethargic, weak, wobbly, vomiting, and had diarrhea. She struggled through the weekend (Derrick took her to an emergency vet place last Friday – they checked her vitals, pronounced her fine, and told us to just monitor her and get her into our regular vet as soon as we could). We changed up what we were feeding her, moved her bed downstairs, and gave her all of our love this week. She’s slowly been on the mend – the vomiting and diarrhea stopped on Monday – and we were able to finally get into the vet yesterday. They did bloodwork and we should have the results back on Monday – she said she thought the stomach issues were a separate coincidence from the weakness/wobbliness she was experiencing in her back legs. She did a few muscle tests on her back legs and while her back left leg performed just fine, her back right leg was showing signs of something going on. They gave us meds to help her joints and said for us to continue to monitor her through the weekend – and said they’d call us Monday with her bloodwork results. We miss our spunky pup – she’s still just not herself. We know she’s getting older (Abby is 12 years old!) but we weren’t quite prepared for her to get sick like this.
- Speaking of sick – the kids have been sick all week too. Nothing major – just colds and coughs. Leander got it first and was generous enough to share with his sister. Thankfully, Derrick and I have so far avoided it (knock on wood!)
- Turns out: choosing a siding color + new roof color is way harder than it looks. Talk about a gigantic decision.
- I published our Abbey Archives film from our month of September! We watched it after I uploaded it to YouTube and as always – the kids LOVE seeing themselves (and the crazy things they do) on TV. We then got lost down the rabbit hole of watching previous family films I’ve made – going all the way back to January 2021. It’s absolutely INSANE how much the kids have grown and changed over the last 21 months!!
However! We discovered a downside to watching our old family films: while we were watching our January 2021 film, we saw that Leander carried around a small stuffed “Nemo” fish the entire month. Cute right? There was just one problem: as soon as he saw it on the TV, he instantly declared that he wanted his “Nemo” fish back. Braelynn thought it was still up in his bedroom and ran up to look for it, but I had just done a pretty major stuffed-animal purge and (unfortunately) he was nowhere to be found. This (of course) led to tears and sobs and “Where did he go?” questions – the whole nine yards.
Thankfully, I had just stashed all of the stuffies up in our attic (I hadn’t actually “purged” them, just put them away), so I was able to go up and find him pretty quickly. Needless to say: we had a very overjoyed little boy when Mama came down with his “Nemo” (who, he had completely forgotten existed quite a long time).
OOPS – so, full disclaimer! Watching old home movies might dredge up memories of old, loved stuffed animals.
[…] thinking, wait, didn’t Leander just move into a bigger bed a few months ago? The answer is yes, he moved into a toddler bed last October – but he was truly too big for it from the very beginning, so we knew his time in the toddler bed […]