Eating and Sleeping

It seems that when children are really young a mom is very attentive to their sleeping and eating habits (as well as the elimination of what has been consumed). Ian stayed on a four nap a day schedule longer than Nadia did, but Nadia took longer to transition to two naps a day. This week Ian has gone from 3 naps a day to 2 naps. The problem has been that his naps are still usually only 30-45 minutes long. I put him down later for his morning nap (10:10am) even though he had been up since 5:50am, but he still only slept 40 minutes. I put him down at 1:30 for his second nap, and I was really hoping that he'd take a longer afternoon nap. He woke up at 2:00. I gave him some milk, and he fell back asleep! He slept in my arms for quite awhile, and then I put him back in his crib since Nadia woke up. He ended up taking a long nap (for him it was super long). I am hoping that his naps will each be at least one hour long on average. I also wish he's sleep in a little longer. He usually gets up between 5:45-6:00am, and it's not that I put him to bed super early. For example tonight he went to bed at 7:40pm. Last night I fed him around 1am, but usually he's sleeping at least 10 hours straight, which is a big improvement although it's hard not to recall that when Nadia was 8 months old she was sleeping 12 hours straight at night on average.

Nadia likes peas! I was so relieved that we didn't have a battle over eating veggies tonight. I called them French peas (from VeggieTales), and she gobbled them up before eating her spaghetti.  Ian only likes milk. There was a time when he'd eat carrots or sweet potatoes. Not now. If I get some cereal in his mouth (oatmeal or rice cereal), he gags until he throws up. Same goes for Cheerios or puffs. If he sees a spoon coming in his direction, he turns his head away from me and cries. When he's sitting on my lap while I'm eating, I have to work hard to keep everything away from him. He wants to grab it with his hands, but he doesn't want any solid food in his mouth. I use one hand to hold his hands (or he grabs the spoon from me), and I use the other hand to put the spoon in his mouth while holding his face in my direction. It's tricky. I go through a lot of work to get a tiny bit of food in his mouth. This happens with fruit and veggies. I'm going to call his Pediatrician to see if I need to be concerned about this or not. I've been trying to get him to eat solid foods for 3 full months now. Since I'll be teaching 3 nights a week in the near future, I've given up the evening feeding as far as nursing him. We're down to just one feeding a day (first thing in the morning). I'm hoping we can keep that one going for at least 3 more months. We shall see.