After the children go to bed

I think we have a new way to put Rachel to bed. She really does enjoy sleeping, it's just getting her there that's the hard part. The girl gets overstimulated just by having her eyes open.

She's slept fairly well the last few nights, which I appreciate. I put her to sleep by a series of entering her room and rocking her on my yoga ball--a workout and a comfort session all in one, and then letting her scream in her room. See, she doesn't want me to hold her unless she wants some cuddles which typically means that she has to be either really excited or really upset. Screaming helps her be cuddly.

But I really can't stand her screaming. Not at all. It makes me cry (and *cough* leak milk *cough*). So I've found that I can ignore her better if I am distracted in some way.

Tonight we cleaned our house. Our poor little house was in shambles from finals/being sick/staying up all night with an overactive baby. It needed a makeover. Andrew and I worked hard and I intermittently went and rocked Rachel. Eventually she fell asleep, snuggling her toy bunny.

With the house clean and the baby asleep, Andrew and I broke out our triominoes set and played a few rounds together. We figure this can be an on-going tradition, to clean the house together after we send the kids to bed and then do something fun together. That way the kids will think that we just do boring things, like cleaning the house, after they go to bed and they won't want to stay up after we send them to bed because they'll know that they would have to help clean up, more rigorously than just their regular chores. If they happen to want to stay up then we can just put them to work--and if they work hard then they deserve to do whatever fun activity we do.

Plus, the trick will be on them because sometimes Andrew and I don't even do anything fun after we are done working. We just go to bed. So they'll never know if we're going to do something fun after the work is done or not--more incentive to just go to bed.

For now cleaning just helps distract me from Rachel's operatic screaming. She doesn't really have chores yet.

Anyway, triominoes was fun. I won the first round, hands down, but the second round put us in a bit of a grid lock. It took forever. Midway through the round Andrew remarked,

"Eventually one of us is going to win."

"Thank you, captain obvious," I retorted. Of course one of us would win...

Neither of us did though. We ended up calling it a draw because neither of us could put our pieces anywhere, even after we gave up and looked at each other's pieces. I guess technically I won because I only had one piece that I couldn't play while Andrew had two.

He won the third game, by the way. We always (at least, we usually) play triominoes in three. It's good luck, I hear.