After Calvin was born I started dreading long weekends. Calvin is very attached to schedules and having three days at home always seemed to disrupt life too much. However, I think this long weekend was fairly successful.

Sabbath, I left the house around 9 and Calvin and I went to church. I had to go practice for music next week at someone else’s house at 4 that afternoon so instead of going home or to the Carbon Valley Library, I drove to the Westminster library. Per our normal routine, Calvin fell asleep on the way there (driving is one of the few ways to force him to nap) and I sat in the car a couple of hours reading waiting for him to wake up. Once he woke up, we went and played in the children’s section for a while before heading to our appointment. We didn’t get home till around 6:30. Fortunately, Jaeger was able to pick up pizza so we were able to eat as soon as we got home.

Sunday I had the day off from work but we had the babysitter come over anyway. I think she’s working out very well. Calvin seems to like her a lot. I went down to the basement and spent most of the time scanning mementos from past years. I plan to scan most of the papers and then get rid of them. I never look at them anyway so they might as well just be in a digital form. Afterwards, I took Calvin for a walk in the stroller so he’d take a nap and when he woke up, we went grocery store shopping.

Today we went on a short hike at Chautauqua. Calvin seemed in good spirits the whole time. Unfortunately, the last 5 minutes of the hike he tried to fall asleep. He had his eyes closed for a moment before I caught it and kept him awake. The only reason I did this is because we would have needed to transfer him to the car and it’s much better if we can get him to sleep in the car where we can just sit and wait for him to wake up. We went and had lunch at Tokyo Joes and Calvin impressed Jaeger by being able to eat with chopsticks better than me (which isn’t saying much but still seems pretty amazing for a toddler). We then made a brief stop by an Indian grocery store before heading home. Unfortunately, this is the point where we planned Calvin should nap and he didn’t oblige. While I think he would have been happier without a nap, he did seem to survive fairly well without one.

Down

• Calvin slept very well until around 5:30 this morning. Unfortunately, I chose to go to bed late last night at 11 and so really could have used an extra hour of sleep.

Ups

• I’ve been finding all sorts of interesting books to read, mostly about home selling. I tend to get obsessive in my quest for information (a characteristic shared by my husband as evidenced by his “India Shelf.”). I started researching pregnancy 2 years before I planned (and did) get pregnant. Likewise, I’m now researching house selling as we’re thinking of moving in a little over a year.
• Several weeks ago I created a spreadsheet of house cleaning chores I needed to do and how often. I’ve been doing the routine stuff all along but I decided I needed to get more systematic to make sure I remembered to do the rarer types of things like dust off the fan blades, etc. At first, it felt like I kept adding more things to the schedule without being able to cross anything off but I’m slowly making it through my checklist.

Calvin Moment

• “Parent-Teacher conferences” for Calvin’s daycare were today. Since Jaeger had the day off he got to go to it also. The teacher went through the checklist of things that toddlers might be able to do and offered comments on Calvin’s daily routine. Basically she said he’s doing well and we don’t need to be worried about anything. The teacher said that it was obvious Calvin had an engineering mind. During one day, there were a couple of children clustered by the toy shelf. They wanted to get a xylophone that was behind two other toys. Calvin was the only one to think of pushing the other toys aside so he could reach back and get the toy (this is a complicated skill? It’s often hard for me to know what I should or shouldn’t expect a toddler to think of by himself). Also, when a seat he wanted to sit on was already taken, he built his own using some gymnastic mats they have. He also likes to do things his own way (<sarcasm>isn’t that a surprise?</sarcasm>). The last time he was given playdough to play with, he decided to play with the playdough containers but stacking them up instead of the actual playdough.
• Calvin has started indicating when he needs to use the potty even when he has a diaper on. This is a fairly new skill. I think we’re going to try having him potty train at daycare again.

Simplification

• As mentioned above, I went through about 1/2 a box of old cards, pictures, and other memories and scanned them in and then threw away the physical item.