Jalen's 5 Year Stats

Last Friday we took Jalen to his 5 year wellness check up.  Jalen is growing great: 46lb 3oz (75 – 90%) and 45.5” (95%).  He has always been on the tall side and it’s exciting to see that he hasn’t slowed down one bit.  His BMI is also healthy at 15.7 (50 – 75%).  Since Jalen doesn’t know how to swim yet, the doctor advised that we should get him lessons soon so that he learns within the next couple of years.  

We’ve had some sleep challenges with Jalen since the beginning of the year.  He had always been a good sleeper and he’d been in his own room since about 2 months old.  However, in the last few months he’s been having a hard time either falling asleep in his own room or staying asleep.  We had always been firm about not sharing a bed with him but we’ve had to pick our battles after too many sleepless nights.  We’ve tried all kinds of different rewards and punishments with mixed results.  Since one of his key complaints is that he wants to sleep with someone, we’ve moved Jalen into a room with Max.  This has worked well for the most part except on the nights that Jalen would accidently wake up Max and all hell would break loose.  Some nights Jalen has slept on the floor of our bedroom because we wouldn’t let him into our bed and he wouldn’t go back to his room.  Lately, things have been a little better where he would stay in his room and not wake up anyone until at least 6:30am.  His reward is that he could play with his favorite toys (Transformers) and watch his favorite shows (Transformer cartoons on Netflix).  However, I’ve noticed that Jalen makes very calculated trade-offs when it comes to this reward system.  You see he goes to school all day on Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays.  On the night before those days, he’s more likely to break to rule and come into our bed.  That’s because there’s very little time, if any, to enjoy his reward the next day.  Whereas on the nights before a non-school day (he stays home with Grandma on Tuesdays and Thursdays), he is more likely to follow the rule since he’ll have all day to enjoy his reward.  This theory has been proven at least once.  I’m really hoping that he’ll grow out of this phase and go back to sleeping well without us.  Until then, we’ll just have to keep refining our incentive system to outsmart a 5 year old.

The Big Move

I've been away from our blog for a while because we've been busy with our big move.  Everything happened pretty quickly.  From the time that we got the idea to move in with Rick's mom, to finding a renter for our Bellevue home, to putting a deposit down on a new daycare, to scheduling the move date only took about a couple of months. 

We were lucky with finding a renter quickly but it also posed a challenge.  Originally, I wanted to move right before September so that it would line up with the school year.  I imagined Jalen would start in kindergarten and I'd have some time to find Max a new daycare.  But the renters wanted to move in ASAP, so we settled on May 1.  Rick and I scrambled to look for a daycare for both Max and Jalen.  I knew it was going to be pretty tough getting full time care for Max since he's only 2 and not yet potty trained.  Most places were completely full.  I only toured 2 centers, a Bright Horizons downtown near my office and another center called Little Eagles also near downtown.  Bright Horizons is a chain and I had toured one of their centers before when I was looking for care for Max as an infant.  It's very nice but also really expensive compared to our current daycare.  Since our choices were so limited and we had to make a decision quick, I settled on BH because of the quality of the center and its proximity to my office. 

Once we got the daycare down, we needed to figure out what to do with our stuff.  Rick's mom's house is 5 bedrooms with a full basement but she already has a house full of furniture and so do we.  So we had to decide what to keep for use, what to store, what to sell and what to dump.  We posted a bunch of stuff on craigslist and had some luck early on. We also got help from my parents and borrowed a truck to move some stuff before the moving date.  On top of that, Rick filled our SUV each night and made almost daily runs to his mom's house after work to drop off stuff.  Even so, on moving day we filled a full 24-foot truck.  Rick and I spent 9 hours organizing and working alone side of the movers.  After the movers left, we spent all night unpacking the essentials so that we could actually take a shower and have linens to make up the beds for the kids.  That was one of the longest days of my life.  Then we spent all of Saturday cleaning our Bellevue house to get it ready for the renters.  We then spent all of Sunday unpacking so we could do basic things like making breakfast and do laundry. 

Coincidentally Rick's mom planned a trip to California to visit his sister for 2 weeks during our big move so she missed out on all of the mess.  For the week following our move, we had to figure out a new routine of drop off/pick up and commuting to/from work.  Jalen is only in daycare Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays now (to save some money), so on one of the days Rick took him to his office to spend the day there.  I took the kids to daycare by riding the light rail and it was quite a challenge to herd 2 kids through the streets of downtown.  Downtown traffic is very congested during rush hours so carpooling with Rick isn't a great option either.  It's definitely different from what we were used to.  Our old daycare was just a quick 5 minute drive from our home on our way to work and I didn't realize just how convenient and nice that was.  We're still trying to figure out what our new routine will be.

On a positive note, the kids are adjusting really well to Bright Horizons.  I took Max and Jalen to visit the center twice before their official full day but I was still nervous that Max is not going to last the full day.  When he started in daycare when he was just one year old, he cried and didn't eat at all.  We had to pick him up early from school because he was too upset.  His new teacher Lucy at Bright Horizon was nice enough to send me an email to let me know that Max was doing great, not crying and ate all of his lunch.  It was a huge relief for me!  Jalen was shy in his new class but by the end of the week he already made new friends.  When I was picking him up on Friday he was play punching with a boy named Sam and we couldn't even break them up when his dad was picking him up as well.

We moved our dining table a couple of week before moving day and the kids loved eating at their picnic table.

The whole house pretty much looked like this on moving day.  We just put things wherever we could.

We had the movers unload under the car port so we could move the boxes into the right rooms.

After a long day of cleaning on Saturday, our Bellevue house is all ready!

The place looked so big when it's all empty!

This was Max's last day at his daycare and his best buds Cordell and Henry gave him big hugs for bye bye.

Max's first day at his new daycare.

Max's new class has just 6 kids and 1 teacher.

This is an exciting and also stressful change for us.  I'm looking forward to our new environment and enjoying living in the city again.