Baby Boot Camp

Jude's going to be 15 months on Monday and a few habits had to go.  This week was Baby Boot Camp.

• Drinking only, and I do mean only, from the same Nuk brand sippy cup that is now impossible to find replacements for, and the ones we own are cracked and leaking from Jude's launch pad arm.
• Only taking a morning nap, so I was ON from about 12pm to 7 or 7:30.  Babies tend to start out at their happiest in the morning and it degenerates from there.  Even when Jude was taking an am and pm nap, the afternoon waking hours were a little tricky.  Without a nap it was getting a little melodramatic.
• This is my fault: I wasn't letting him learn to feed himself because I'm OCD about clean floors and walls.  I had to take a deep breath and give him the spoon.  I really hate how this was just the little leagues parallel to how I will have to let go from time to time in the next 5, 10, 15, 20, million years..................[sob crying].

Baby Boot Camp Phase 1: Interestingly enough, he's better at feeding himself than I thought he'd be.

Baby Boot Camp Phase 2: I think he just needed to be ready to push his nap back.  I had tried to work it about a month ago but he just would take either no nap or a 40 minute nap.  Time was on my side and for whatever reason, when I kept him up till 1pm, he went for it and took a 2 hour nap.  Such has it been thenceforth.

Baby Boot Camp Phase 3: Sippy transfer was a little harder.

I have bought so many different kinds of sippies and tried a million methods to coax and encourage and lure him into getting his fluids from something else.  Preferably something else I can replace easily if/when it's lost, broken, or hidden under a seat in the car for a week and I would rather throw it out than open up Pandora's Curdled Milk Box.  And then a few days ago it dawned on me that I have spent WAY TOO MUCH BRAIN POWER on this.  It should not cause this much anguish.  And it also made me excited for the day I can logically explain things to him.

Knowing that the sweetest time of the day is in the morning, and that I love giving him his cherished sippy of milk during that time, I knew I'd flake on Sippy Boot Camp every time unless I rid the house of the soon-to-be Ex Sippies.

Bye Bye.  And yes, I know I should've recycled those DC cans.  I usually do.

It took some screaming, and a few head burials of horror in his hippo chair, but in the end, pinning him down and keeping the nozzle in his mouth until he got hold of the milk waiting for him worked, and now we have....

Ahhhhh.  So much more age appropriate, and no leaking.

Now we just have to find a different method of keeping him happy and quiet in a still stroller or high chair for more than 5 minutes, because Dum Dums make him sticky.

And sometimes we sit on them and have a Dum Dum stuck on our bum.