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.
