Happy Holidays! Halloween is over, snow is falling outside our windows, and all the stores are filled with Christmas decor. I'd be pumped, but I'm just not ready. We won't even be decorating our home for Christmas this year, which is sad because we only have one more Christmas season in our Casper home we love so much. At the end of next week we drive to Utah, from where Jared will fly to Spokane for an intense OB rotation. After that it's off to Seattle for Christmas with Jared's family (yay!). We'll get back to Casper around the new year, and then a month later we have to leave for another month-long rural rotation in Evanston. I'm excited to spend Thanksgiving with my family (it's been 6 years since I've done this) and Christmas with Jared'd family, but sad I'll be apart from Jare for Thanksgiving and his birthday.
We had a very full Halloween. It started with all the parties I talked about last week, then on Halloween we went trick-or-treating at Jared's clinic in the afternoon. Jack was not excited to get in his costume. Poor guy is terrified of costumes. He did ok once he realized that the only people in costumes were other little kids wearing princess dresses, but then some older boys came around the corner wearing scary masks and he lost it. He clutched his stuffed bunny close the entire time. He did like saying "trick-or-treat" (more like "cheeee!") to the nurses and getting candy.
^^Jared went dressed as a different doctor, Dr. Babcock haha
On Halloween, we went to a ward member's open-garage dinner/donuts party. From there we went trick-or-treating with our Philippino friend Arne and her son Liam. It was freezing out, so we only lasted a few houses. After that we drove into Casper to one of the oldest streets in town, where several big hundred-year-old mansions sit. The street was blocked off and all the houses were extravagantly decorated for Halloween. There was no getting Jack's duck costume back on him, so we just walked the street and enjoyed the festiveness before getting Jack back home and to bed.
After Halloween we decided it was time to wean Jack from his pacifier. We'll have to do it eventually anyway, and we figured it will only get harder the longer we wait. That didn't stop it from being extremely hard now. There were probably three days in a row where Jack didn't take any naps during the day and he couldn't fall asleep until after 9:00 in the evening. We're just starting to see the light. He still cries pretty intensely when we first put him down without Mr. Binks, but now he's quieting down and falling asleep within usually 20 minutes. A big improvement. Now we just need to get his naps back where they used to be. Before this he was napping for 2-3 hours a day, usually in two separate naps, sometimes in one. Now he's only doing one nap for an hour if we're lucky. It's horrifying. With our next baby, we're going to hold onto two naps for as looooong as possible again. That's what my sleep-training friend Ashley recommended and I'm a believer.
I might be the one having the hardest time with the whole binky weaning now. It's so sad to think that when I go to check on him in his sleep before bed, I'll never catch my baby boy sucking sweetly on his pacifier again. Ugh. I'm not crying, you're crying. One thing that's helped with this ordeal is that on the first day of the weaning, we went to the thrift store and loaded up on tons of new toys for Jack. Now even though he's not sleeping as much, at least he's usually pretty happy since he loves playing with his new cars. His favorite things to do are play with them in his Batman playhouse or drive them around the coffee table. He's more self-entertained than he's ever been before. Thank u dear thrift shop!
