More sleep

- Sleep has been bad lately, because Jack has been going through a period of getting out of bed early in the morning, getting up after we put him to bed for up to an hour or more, getting up sometimes in the middle of the night. There's nothing quite like waking up and seeing a little person standing next to your bed. We started putting a gate up, and that helps a little. At first he really didn't like it, but then he was okay with it. "It's to keep you in your room, so you'll get more sleep," I explained. Now when I'm going to leave the room, he says "Put the gate up. Put the gate up, Daddy."

It's all been very frustrating, seeing as how none of us are getting enough sleep, but we'll figure it out. On the bright side, every once in a while there are moments like today, where he was so tired that I was able to sing him to sleep at naptime. I sat on the edge of his bed and sang "Swing on a Star," and he curled up on his side and went to sleep. His eyes slowly grew heavy, fluttered a bit, and then he slept.

- Ian's parents, "Nanny and Pop," have this shopping cart toy that Jack likes, he played with it when we were there last. This morning we were playing with his little dragon toy, and also the smaller dragon that goes in a game Aunt Robin brought. The larger one is the Daddy, according to Jack. Anyway, Jack wanted to give them a ride in the shopping cart, and he's going to the door and saying, Bye, I'm going to Nanny and Pops, bye. So we dug out this "Hungry Hippo," that Emily got when he was like 6 months old, and he pushed that around, with a collection of toys riding in it, as if they were in a cart. That seemed to work.

- The other night, Jack woke up crying for us. Emily went in, coming back some 5 minutes later. "He was cold," she said, "And had taken off his pajama shorts (it was warm when he went to bed) and pulled a pair of long pajama pants out of his top drawer. 'I picked these out myself,' he said. 'You put these on me.'" Kind of cute.

I could write much more, but I'm pretty tired.