Little Buddy, Age Two Years and Two Months

I haven't blogged about parenting recently. I think the problem is that to do it, I feel like I need some kind of big essay topic and deep insight! Oh, how I long for the days of LiveJournal when posting that you went to the dining hall and got a sub was worthy of its own entry. So I am going to try something, a series of snapshots into Little Buddy at Age Two Years and Two Months:

• LB doesn't tend to have big emotional reactions to books yet, as far as I've noticed, with two exceptions. One is that he hates it when anyone in a book is sleeping. "Get up get up get up!" he'll insist at the sleeping figure. I should note that a lot of the time, he picked the book, and it is something like Sleep Baby, Safe and Snug where the whole point of the book is going to bed! The other book he gets upset over is How to Bathe Your Little Dinosaur: he goes "no! no!" when the bath gets drained at the end. (Despite this, he recently has been cutting his own baths pretty short.)
• 
  A couple weeks ago that long-dreaded day finally arrived: he was sufficiently angry about having to go to bed that he was able to climb out of the crib. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that his bedroom door doesn't latch right, and so once out of the crib, he would get out of the room!
  
  Once it was clear this was not a fluke, we took the side off the crib to convert it into a "big boy bed." And I swapped out the doorknob with a different one. (Now he can get into the sewing room, though, so... not great.) At first the newfound ability to get right out of bed disrupted all his sleep training: on the monitor I could see that he would lie down peacefully, but pop up as soon as I closed the door and begin crying at the door. But after a few days of consistency, things settled down. He does still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and demand water... even though we leave a cup of water on his nightstand so he can just grab it himself!
  
  We've also been struggling with him waking up very early in the morning: 4am sometimes, though wouldn't get him out of his bed until 5am. Hayley's mom group suggested some fancy timing lights-- the lights turn on at a certain time and you tell the kid they can't get out of bed until it comes on. These things cost hundred of dollars, though, so we just bought a $9 wifi-controlled smart plug from Amazon and plugged his nightlight into it. It seems to have worked? He still wakes up early sometimes, but it seems to be less frequent.
  
  One day this week we were startled to wake up to him crying... at 6:10! Surely the latest he has slept since March. I don't always set an alarm because we can depend on him, so this was rather later than we wanted to sleep on a day where Hayley teaches!
• 
  One time he bumped his knee, and pulled a band-aid magnet off the fridge and placed it on the injured spot.
• We put him in time out when he does something he's not supposed to. I'm not sure it's super-effective, but recently he has been putting himself in time out. Like, he'll dump the cat food and then declare "time out!" before we even react. Sometimes he just says it, but sometimes he goes and shuts himself in!
  
  Cleverly, he sometimes uses it as a delaying tactic. Say you're trying to get him to clean up his toys; he'll scratch you and then declare "time out!" Clean-up averted! Or at least postponed.