We had a big busy day on Saturday. We ran by the bank and the post office first, and then went to the park. It's a nice little park - it has one play area for younger/smaller kids, and one for bigger kids. Unfortunately, the play area for bigger kids was pretty full, with someone having a birthday party there (and it was a bunch of little girls, so it wasn't like J really wanted to play with them! LOL). The crowd bothered J, so we tried the smaller playground. Alas, he's too big to fit comfortably in most of the equipment there! So we gave up on the park before too long, but we'll try again another Saturday. After that, we went to Trade Days. It was small, not a whole lot of vendors, and I didn't see a tremendous amount of truly handmade stuff, certainly not in the bath and body/candle realm of things (hooray! Opportunity! That is, should Brian and I get to where we're proficient enough at making stuff to have enough to sell - we've talked about trying to get into soapmaking/candle making/bath and body stuff, either as a side business or maybe, someday, after a shitload of hard work, an actual brick-and-mortar business). There was a John Deere tractor display, though (one of the local lawn and garden shops had some of their products on display), and J had a pure fit over that. He had to sit on every tractor and pretend to drive it, more than once - I wished I'd had the camera for that. There were also puppies there - we looked at them, but he didn't ask for one. (Good thing. I'm not inclined to get a puppy. A small boy is enough work.) We bought a lucky bamboo plant for me and two little dog figurines for J - one of the dogs he got has its leg hiked up and is peeing on a fire hydrant, and J thinks that's the funniest.thing.ever. He is such a boy. After that, we went to McDonald's - I ate, and J took about three bites of his food and ran around like a wild thing in the Playplace. I told him he had to eat, or we wouldn't come inside anymore, that I wasn't paying $4.00 for a Happy Meal just so he could play. We probably stayed there an hour, and then ran by Wal-Mart to pick up a couple of things - we had to get a present for J's little friend Jackson, whose party is this coming Saturday at Pump It Up - I think that might be a good place for J's party, if he likes it), and some other odds and ends. Given what I realize now about how sleep deprived he's been, he did remarkably well. After that we just went home.
On Sunday, he was up at 6:30 (after going to sleep at 10:00 - yeah, 8 1/2 hours with no nap, that's not nearly enough - that's about like me getting 4 or 5 hours of sleep). I had jumped out of bed at 6:00 when I heard the cuckoo clock, thinking it was really 7:00 and I was insanely late for work, and then I realized - it's Sunday. D'oh. So I'd just gotten back to sleep when here came J, ready to go. I didn't realize it was 6:30 until I sat up, and then I told him we needed to lay back down, and I made some comment about going back to bed. He started sobbing hysterically, and I hugged him and asked him what was wrong. He grabbed onto me and said, "No, you can't come back to bed, I don't want you to leave me in the living room by myself!" Poor darling, he'd thought I was going to leave him. I told him no, I wouldn't do that, and he settled down a little bit. He was just berserk at the thought of me leaving him, though. I'm still not sure what's up with that.
Mother's Day was a low-key day. Much to my surprise, K came by and brought me a card and a little something from J. It was a package of dried cherries covered in chocolate - not a big something, but it's the thought that counts. J signed his name in the card and brought me the card and cherries. He said, "Daddy said I should give this to you." LOL I love four-year-old honesty!
I tried to get him to take a nap around noon. We laid down for about five minutes, and he spent 4 1/2 of that screaming that he wasn't tired, he didn't want to lay down. (That's when I decided bedtime would be EARLY.) We spent the rest of the afternoon playing and doing wash and what have you, and I popped him in the bath at 6:15. I guess we played in the bath for about half an hour or so, and then he got into bed and we read our books. After that I tucked him in (he didn't even comment on it still being light outside, so you KNOW he was tired), and we did the me-checking-back-every-couple-of-minutes thing for a little while, then he asked to rock in the rocking chair. We did, and I sang to him (he's partial to songs from the Baptist Hymnal, so that's what I sing!), and after we'd gone through two or three, he asked me to sing him one more Bible verse and said then he'd go to bed. We did, he got back in bed, and he asked me to sit with him and just be quiet. So I did, and in about five minutes or so he rolled over and curled up into a ball, and he was out. Such a tired little boy.
I sure hope we can work the schedule to where he can get more sleep every night. He needs it, and I do, too. It's not realistic to expect that I'll have him in bed by 7:00 every night - most nights we're just getting home then, and I don't have a spouse or other family member who could pick him up earlier and get him home sooner, so we'll have to see what we can do. I can turn the TV off earlier, though, and keep him completely away from caffeine and sugar in the evenings, and I may even get a light-filtering shade for his room to help with getting him to sleep earlier in the evenings (as the summer goes on, it may stay light until 9:00 or 9:30). But we've got to get better about getting sleep, and we need to make that a priority. If it means no trips to Target or Wal-Mart during the week because that keeps us out too late and up too late, then that's how it will be.
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