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.