After months of hard work, Emma recently earned her fish. Emma has always had a difficult time staying in her bed at night. She generally would wake up every other night and come into our room. On the nights she actually slept through the night, Drew would wake up. I attribute most of Emma's problems to her tendency to get sick during the night. She frequently throws up multiple times during the night requiring her to be close to mom and dad- those nights I don't get angry, it is the nights she comes in when she isn't sick. Granted the other half of the problem has to do with a combination of being exhausted in the middle of the night and not having the energy to force her to go back to bed and not wanted to cause a melt down that would wake up Drew. Ok- so back to the fish. After getting the idea from some of our neighbors we got a fish bowl and made fish tickets. Each time Emma stayed in her bed all night without waking up she got to put a fish ticket in the bowl. We didn't have a set number we were trying to reach, just until she had made a substantial improvement. At first I would take one out every time she got out of bed, but after the first week we were in the negative fishes and it wasn't proving to be a good motivator for her. Eventually, after a couple of months of hard work, Emma has made some great improvements. She isn't perfect yet, but in the past month aside from 4 sick nights, she has only come into our room 2-3 times (and I made the improvement to drag myself out of bed to actually force her back to her own room- or I would just kick Andy until he did it). We were all excited to pick out Emma's fish- she got a beta fish. She named her fish Emily and made numerous name tags saying "Fishy Emily" that she taped around the outside of the bowl. We took the name tags off to take pictures. Congratulations Emma!!! Now if only we could do something about Drew...
Emma making her best fish face.
Drew loves Emily as well- sometimes a little too much.
4 comments:
Yeah for Emma. We actually struggle with Kenlie a little still. She gets up every night to go to the bathroom and often she comes in our room to use our bathroom because she doesn't know why she's up so she must need a snuggle with mommy. Once we get her to go to the bathroom so goes back to her bed just fine, but until I realized that's what was waking her up in the night and forcing her to go she was waking up 2-3 times a night. Makes for very exhausting, low patient days as a mommy. Glad that you figured out a trick for her. Oh and by the way the Scone-cutter story is classic. Andy might be the funniest guys ever. We loved having him as our home teacher. Still our favorite one to date. Hopefully with the new fish you guys will be getting some much needed sleep.
hey, way to go, I think I'll try that with a hamster once we move, I think it might be a little traumatic for Seth. When we first moved here is when all his sleep trouble began!
--Julie
Wahoo Emma! Keep up the good work. As for Drew, maybe you could offer a puppy?!
I'm stealing your first song for my blog.
That is a cute idea! I hope she continues to sleep better at night. I think that is the hardest part about being a mom...sleep inturupted nights. I live for the day when I get to sleep through the night again.
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