Well, it has definitely been a trying week or so. Pink eye re-emerged, triple head colds that the girls were kind enough to share with their mother, nighttime coughing interrupting sleep, AND our mini masterminds are now putting a good foot forward in escaping their cribs.
I knew this day would come, but did it absolutely have to be before 22 months?! I was optimistically and unrealistically hoping for this to happen closer to age three!
In addition to problem solving the crib situation, it looks like we are starting the anxiety portion of development that we skipped over six plus months ago. Not only is Reagan having a hard time self soothing at night, but now she is back to hating nap time and her crib and it’s starting to rub off on her sisters. We went through this last summer for a bit but were somehow able to overcome the issue. This time around, it doesn’t appear to be that easy.
Last week Reagan proved her skills in climbing from one crib to the other, like Harper achieved a few days earlier, so we separated the cribs to not touch one another. Luckily the room is just big enough to scoot the dresser over and turn Harper’s crib against the side wall, providing enough space to put Reagan’s centered on the back wall.
This worked for a couple of days, until Reagan decided she really didn’t want to take a nap and lifted her leg up, barrel rolled over hte side, and used her arms to lightly decline to the floor, almost effortlessly. After a day or two with this issue, we opted to trim the legs of her crib so that her mattress can sit on the floor but not slide out from the confines of the crib.
Want to guess how well that worked?
Not even FIVE minutes. We put her down for bed on Wednesday night with the usual routine, turned off the light and walked out of the room, and immediately she climbed right up the now higher crib railings and right out into the hallway. Trying to put her back in the crib was almost worse, because her escape caused grave anxiety for Emerie and Harper, with full on screaming tantrums coming from both their cribs. Harper cried so hard as we attempted to put Reagan back that she puked up a good portion of her dinner. Nothing improves your evening like seeing regurgitated breast milk and half processed mushrooms on the floor. This, of course, resulted in the light back on, new sheets and sleep sack, and a quick scrub of the floor/rug…all while everyone screamed.
We tried putting the blanket sleep sack on Reagan, the one that confines her feet enough she (in theory) can’t hoist one leg over the side. How did that work, you ask? Well everyone hollered in rage when we left the room and turned off the light, so much so that Emerie decided to puke up her dinner all over everything, bringing us back in to clean up like with Harper the previous night. Good news was in that five minutes Reagan didn’t even try to escape. Bad news? I literally watched her take the blanket sleep sack off by herself, like it was no big thing. So that’s not going to work either and we put her back in the open footed one she prefers.
In efforts to delay the inevitable shift to toddler beds, we tried one last ditch effort, mildly edited our typical, nightly routine. It’s been a bit since we’ve had to chance anything up for that process, and the girls are so busy growing and changing now, so I guess it’s time. One of us will now sit in their room until everyone dozes off, much like we did when they were a lot smaller (until we wised up and let them fuss a bit to fall asleep). So far Craig has done a couple nights of this so I could shower and scrub the lovely pink eye goop out of my eyes. I can hear him calmly tell them to lay back down, to settle, to sssshhhhhhhh. So far Reagan has not attempted to climb out while he’s in the room and eventually drifts off to sleep.
While this is a band-aid measure for sure, it hasn’t kept them from waking up an hour or two later and losing their minds throughout the night. I’m pretty sure this is getting worse, not better, as they get older. I’m attributing this to the cold/cough/pinkeye more than the anxiety; in either case they don’t stay in their cribs long enough!
We tried putting everyone down for nap the regular way yesterday and Reagan didn’t try to climb out. Craig reinforced “lay down” from outside their bedroom, while watching on the baby camera, and that seemed to work for now. The other theory is that she can’t climb out without the crib meshing; but I’m not sure that is really it.
About the only good thing from this past week pertains to Emerie’s eye follow up. I took her to Dr. Winkle last Monday, expecting to be told another surgery would be needed to loosen up the eye muscles that were tightened in October.
While being less than cooperative (in trend with the week we are having), after his first look he said she was progressing along nicely and that no surgery was needed yet. So we will reassess in three months after her birthday! We also have to take the other two in to ensure no issues have occurred since Emerie was originally diagnosed.
On an interesting note, Dr. Winkle did mention that he’s seen a couple other sets of identicals (twins) this winter. We were concerned last year that everyone would have the same issue and need the cataract surgery, since they are genetically the same, and were incredibly pleased that this was not the case. Apparently the identicals he’s seen recently are all presenting the same issues (don’t worry, he was very vague for HIPPA) and he said that the Douglets were the only recent outlier for this. So glad something is working out in our favor. It also goes to show that Emerie’s cataract is not a genetic issue but something environmental, likely occurring from pressure in the womb that differed from where Harper and Reagan were positioned.
Interesting stuff indeed!
Last Friday Nanny Chris and I loaded everyone up for an eyes, chest and ears check, especially since the doctor’s office refused to prescribe more pinkeye drops without an in-person visit from the girls. Better to be safe than sorry as we enter into a long weekend off work.
It turns out that both Reagan and Harper have double ear infections AND eye infections (pinkeye unconfirmed) and Emerie has the eye infection and would have an ear one if the tubes weren’t draining a bunch. So yay…no wonder no one believes in napping this week or sleeping at night!
To top all of this, I managed to get all of the girls’ illnesses, including a bacterial eye infection. So no contacts for me this week and it’s oddly strange, like in the first months after having the girls, when we didn’t sleep more than 90 minutes at a time so contacts weren’t worth putting in.
If someone could please remind 2020 that this year should be good…that would be great? The first two weeks haven’t started out very strong and this better not be an indication of what age two will be like.
❤
The Douglets 