I baked bread, a lot of bread. Take a look.

Looks yummy, doesn’t it? I baked yesterday, too. All together I baked a total of nine loaves of bread. I am feeling very proud of myself right now. Well, except for the part where I killed my mixer. I feel kind of bad about that. And I’m not sure what to do with the carcass. Can you recycle a dead stand mixer?

It appears that my plan worked, mostly. I’m feeling much better today. The cough is gone and I’m hoping that the sore throat is on its way out as well.

Now, on to the first question:

M3 wrote: “If you feel like taking a request, I’d love to hear anything about the girls’ napping/sleeping at night/transition out of cribs/etc. Any sleep tips you can offer would be appreciated — we’re all about the (lack of) sleeping right now.”

The Cupcakes moved into their big girl beds almost exactly one year ago, on November 23rd, 2006. How do I know this? Because DH blogged about it. It’s handy having a family archivist. As I recall, they made the transition from crib to mattress pretty smoothly. We left one of their cribs up for a while in case they wanted to sleep there instead, but they never did. The first couple of months that the mattresses were up in their bedroom we spent a lot more time playing in their room to get them used to the new set-up. I let them jump on their beds (my mother is now rolling over in her grave at the thought of children being allowed to jump on the bed - the horror!). We read stories there and snuggled there. We tried to make the beds as enticing as possible.

They certainly sleep much better on the mattresses than they did in their cribs, but ‘much better’ is a very relative term. When they were in their cribs we averaged 6 - 8 wake-ups per night. When they moved to the mattresses it went down to 3 or 4 wake-ups per night. Now we’re down to 2 or 3, and on a very, very good night none at all.

The biggest problem they had with the cribs was that they are both very restless sleepers; they would scoot all around the crib, bonking their heads, getting their feet and hands tangled in the crib rails and dropping their binkies onto the floor all night long. While they never climbed out of their cribs I was certain that there was no way that they would stay put in separate toddler beds. That meant two mattresses on the floor, pushed together and shoved into a corner. To keep them from rolling over onto each other, and to keep S2 from rolling onto the floor, we put a bed rail under her bed. DH has a picture of the original setup here. (Of course) It didn’t always work; on a couple of occasions H2 managed to climb over the rail and flop onto her sister in her sleep. They’ve also both managed to fall off the end of the bed a few times. But, overall it seems to have done its job.

We’ve since removed the bed rail (it was damaged by one too many bed-jumping gone off course) and replaced it with a big ‘ole pile of blankets, pillows and stuffed animals.

As far as sleep tips are concerned, I don’t know if I know all that much. I know a lot about surviving children who don’t sleep, though… We’ve settled on a fixed bedtime and bedtime routine which seems to help. For a good, long time I referred to myself as the Rigidly Inflexible Routine Parent. A little more than two years down the road I’ve gotten more flexible, I no longer stress out if their routine is disrupted, but we still follow all of the steps in the bedtime ritual (minus the bedtime bottle/sippy cup) that we’ve had for two years. For the most part the Cupcakes go to bed quite willingly at this point (definitely NOT the case for the first year or so), but they still wake up at night.

Nap times are another story. They both nap well at preschool - hooray for peer pressure! But they frequently fight the nap at home. When they, or we, really, really need them to take a nap we have resorted to strapping them into their carseats and taking them on a Ride to Sleepytown. Going in and laying down with them until they fall asleep can work, too. But nothing works as well as it used to. I’m afraid that the glorious days of the afternoon nap will soon be coming to an end. …sigh…

I don’t know if that was helpful, or interesting, or if most of you all gave up three paragraphs ago. For those of you who hung on ’til the end - thanks!

And this time it’s me. Whatever virus S2 had merely grazed H2 before crashing full-force into me. I now have the mysterious middle-of-the-night fever and barking seal cough and the sore throat to go with it.

DH has taken over bedtime with the Cupcakes so that I can blog and then go to sleep. I think it’s going well - I can hear water splashing the the girls are shrieking. Either they are getting very clean or Papa is on the losing end of a water fight. Any bets on which it is?

Thank you all for the questions. I really appreciate having something to write about. I will tackle them tomorrow. My plan is to wake up in the morning completely healthy after sleeping a good, solid eight or nine hours. I like my plan.

G’night.

Our friend Denise offered to watch the Cupcakes tonight so that DH and I could have an evening off. (Yay, Denise!!!) The girls love, love, LOVE Denise. She’s known around our house as Auntie ‘Niece. This is what’s known as a win-win situation. The Cupcakes got an evening with Auntie ‘Niece. DH and I got an evening with each other.

DH and I had a terrific dinner at a new restaurant here in town. Denise got to experience some of the joys of parenthood that she, as a child-free adult, would ordinarily not be exposed to. Did I mention that our house is still the Land of Potty Training… ?

Once again one of my beloved children chose to do something for the first time while I was not around. I’ll spare you all the details, suffice it to say that DH and I came home to one twin who now chooses to put more than just her pee-pee in the potty, a stopped up downstairs toilet and an Auntie muttering something about ‘it’ being ‘the size of a potato, I swear.’

Let’s hope that our plumbing is up to the challenge of potty training the second one, shall we?

Let’s hope that I have a tremendously exciting weekend, ’cause I’m running really short of material here. So short, in fact, that I’m going to resort to the dreaded bulleted list today.

- S2 seems to be on the mend, or at least not getting any worse. She still sounds like a seal when she coughs and she still has a stuffy head but the fever seems to be gone.

- As soon as I typed the last sentence she let loose with a coughing fit upstairs.

- DH is (finally) home. Hooray!!!

- That means that it’s bedtime for me.

Hooray!!