I am very happy to report that Chase is sleeping great these days! It’s quite helpful seeing as how we all need our sleep! For a while (recently) it was hard to get him to stay in his bed at nap time and bedtime, and we would have to take him back to his bed dozens of times before he would go to sleep. Sometimes I would take him back so many times at nap time, that I would just start to ignore him and then I would find him sleeping on the wood floor in our room, or in the hallway, like this:
Now he is doing much better, though. We didn’t change anything about our approach, but somehow he snapped out of it. Next step: We started working on getting him to not cry about nap times and bedtimes. Pace made this amazingly cute little chart because we wanted to get him a train table, but not just for no reason…
Chase got to put a cardboard smiley face on the chart at bedtime, but we took it off and put a sad face in its place if he would cry. He really didn’t like getting sad faces. One night he was bawling, and he brought his freshly-earned sad face to me, and cried, "I donnnnn’t waaaaaaaaant thissssss!" At the next sleep time he was able to replace the sad face with a happy one because he didn’t cry that time.
He started to get a little frustrated after a few days of this and not getting his train table, and I realized that the reward was probably too far from the work for a kid his age to feel motivated. So we changed the goal from seven days to five days, and he did it! Haha are we softies or what?!? He loves his train table, almost as much as Pace does!
On a side note, he picked out some monster "jammas" at Old Navy that were super cheap, so I got them for him (since he usually just wears a t-shirt to bed anyway).
Here are a couple other photos of our little "angel" sleeping– which we NEVER take for granted!!!!
