Enter the toddlerdome

 

Life is good. Toddlers are more full on that little bubbies but they are so much more fun. miss s is a walking, talking, dancing machine. She has inherited my love of music but also my dancing style - poor love.  She has a lot of energy and I find our evenings are a lot smoother if she has plenty of park time during the day. Seeing that I find it very interesting when others post their habitual day, I thought I'd write up the loveliness that makes up our days at the moment.*

Most days, unless I'm working, we get up around 7 and have some banana and then some cheese toast.  Sienna has a bit of a play in her cot with some toys while I get myself cosied up for the day. Around 8am we are usually out of the house and walking to our fabbo local park. It has the most awesome play equipment, acres of green grass and a decent coffee outlet nearby. It also has a natural wetland with native black and canadian mountain ducks, coots, black swans, swamp hens and hundreds of sulphur crested cockatoos. miss s has a small snack whilst we are there and then we are back home at about 10. miss s goes down for a nap around 10.30 and sleeps anywhere from 1.5hrs to 3 hours. Absolute heaven given that she was the ultimate 40 min napper for most of last year. During this time, I do emails, read blogs, try to restrain myself from online shopping, commit to some form of housework/ cooking. When miss s wakes up, I have hers and my lunch ready and we eat it together at the table or she perches on my lap if she is feeling a bit snuggly.  We then read some stories**, play with her current obsession play-dough, Sienna might have a play in her room whilst I finish up a few things and then we do our errands for the day, visit friends and try to fit in a walk to the local park (although the pram is not her favourite place to be anymore so the afternoon is usually car-rides everywhere). I try to be home by about 4pm so as to do a bit of a clean up and get dinner sorted. Sienna is usually pretty happy to play at my feet. mr k has been able to get home much earlier these days so we have a bit of a 'nanna' dinner at around 5.30-6pm and then Sienna gets the bath or shower with one of us, bedtime stories and her special night song and it is lights out by 6.30 - 7pm and mr k collects her from her room the next morning at around 7am.

Sienna was such an erratic napper for the first 12 months that my days were all over the place. I could never commit to being anywhere so I am really enjoying being able to plan to do something and actually do it. I spent hours in the car as she wouldn't transfer to her cot. I was also so knackered because she was feeding so much at night. For months she would sleep through the night and then I would have months of being up every 2.5 hours (and less!).  Magically she has turned into a full night sleeper and goes down for her one nap without a peep***. A deeply empathetic "yay" is heard quite often around here.

*this of course doesn't include the parts of the day where miss s throws herself off the furniture, refuses to get off my hip or does such a poo-nami that I need to take a shower and complete change of clothes and any thought of going out of the house is way too difficult.

** we read about 20 books a day at the moment. I read somewhere (Happiest Toddler on the Block?) to 'feed the meter'  which means every 30 mins to stop, get down to your child's level and read a book or do some sort of play for a couple of mins. Sienna loves it and it certainly buys me a lot of extra time when I am trying to complete a task.

*** I'm not completely sure but I think cutting out her just before bedtime breastfeed has enabled Sienna to dramatically improve her ability to self settle  during the night. Actually I don't care if it is or isn't, I'm just thankful!

*edit - mr k just pointed out that I posted an image of his "plumbers". Is it bad that I 'm still not going to remove the image?