Mini update

First up, Happy New Year to everyone. Max and Leo (and I) are slowly readjusting to not having Mommy at home after a nice break over the Christmas/New Year's week. Max is settling back into his school routine and is also working in some swimming and more hip-hop classes (we didn't think he took to them, but one day he asked us why he wasn't taking them any more and begged back in...dying to see how it goes this time around). Leo will be taking the toddler sequel to the Hush-a-bye music and song classes both he and Max took as babies. With Max in full-time care after he turned one, it wasn't really an option for us before. I'm curious to see how Leo likes it - apparently, it is much more active than the class for newborns/babies. Given that Leo loves to dance and listen to singing, I think it will be a big hit.

The other big updates on our end are some major changes with respect to sleep, all of which came about in the last couple of weeks. First up, Max has pretty much completely abandoned his naps. The nice part about this is that he seems to have settled into an earlier bedtime routine, which gives us an extra hour of grown-up time every night. Leo has combined his two morning/afternoon snoozes into a single afternoon nap. Most of the time, he gets up after an hour, still needing more sleep, but he's generally willing to be soothed back into nap 2.0, giving me some good one-on-one time with Max in the afternoons. Leo has also started to allow us to leave his room at night before he falls completely asleep. Sometimes, this means he's squirming for 5 minutes or so after we go and sometimes it means he's babbling and singing to himself for half an hour. Either way, this has also opened up some more grown-up time in the evenings and has made us feel a lot more comfortable about leaving babysitters in charge of night time routines.

So we finally seem to be settling into one of those nice (yet typically too-brief) periods of feeling good about how things are going: we have the ability to get some rest/jobs done at night and the kids are generally happy and healthy. Happy new year indeed :)