Hello and sorry for the delay in writing a new post! I started one last week but got interrupted, then never finished... it was about how Oliver was seeing in the new year with a reaaaally bad cold! But now that's mostly behind him - he still has a bit of a cough, bit of a runny nose, but is mostly himself again.
Trying to think of what he's been up to lately - walking up a storm, that's for sure. It's been so warm here for two days that we've been up to Lake Mohawk both days, walking on the boardwalk then playing in the playground there. He toddles around all over, climbs up on things that are made for bigger kids, keeps me running after him, and he loves the slides! He's a very brave boy, nothing stops him.
He's made big strides in his bedtime routine in the last week - Andy and I have been so pleasantly surprised! I used to have to coax him to sleep and then move him to his crib - otherwise, he'd stand up and scream and cry for ages in his crib. We didn't try it too often, because once or twice he cried so hard he threw up, but it was getting crazy because coaxing him to sleep sometimes took a LONG time. So anyway, one day this week I could tell he was really tired but just wasn't falling asleep, so after about 40 minutes I said, "that's enough!" and brought him to his crib. As usual, he started crying right away, and I closed the door and went downstairs to greet Andy, just home from a late night at work. Literally two minutes later, the crying stopped! In a few more minutes, we went up to check on him, and he was ASLEEP! Just couldn't believe it. And best of all, he's repeated this each night since!! Just a couple minutes of half-hearted crying, then boom, asleep. Yay! He still wakes up halfway through the night and won't settle down unless we take him into bed with us (and dad has to go to the spare room on weeknights for those last few hours) - but I'm sure that will change soon, too. Our big boy.
He's still loving his soups -- we have one more portion of Grandma Carole's celery soup left, and his other recent favorites are chicken noodle (pureed together), split pea with ham (first Uncle Steven's, then a portion from Davy's down the road), butternut squash, and a nice tomato with beef we got at Krogh's in Lake Mohawk. I was thinking how cool it is, and how unusual, that we can bring our 14-month-old to just about any restaurant and know we can find him something to eat on the menu - generally soup - and he'll be happy. How good's that?! A very good boy indeed.
