Nighty-Night

While we are STILL learning how to fast-track the morning routine, we’ve got the nighttime routine down!  It all starts when I pick up Anne Louise from school.  After I smother her with kisses, talk to her teacher, get her “report card,” smother her with more kisses, and then get her settled in the car, she is usually barely holding her eyes open.  By the time we get home (only a short 20 minute drive), this is what she looks like:

AL kept falling asleep with her head forward (in her lap almost!), so we added the little pink things on the side to help keep her head up.  And don’t you just love the “serious” face??  She’s probably resolving the major issues of the world in her sleep.

Sometimes, we don’t come straight home after work -- like when we “accidentally” meet Joan out for a glass of wine on the patio at one of our favorite spots nearby.  So far, Anne Louise has been extremely cooperative in behaving herself – maybe because Joan holds her the whole time??

Most of the time, however, we get home and jump right into dinner.  Anne Louise is still LOVING her cereal, and in fact, she’s recently started trying to grab the spoon and “feed” herself (she also apparently likes to wipe her own mouth, too, and since the napkin is safer than the spoon, she gets to play with that more often).

Maybe sometimes, she also likes to eat the napkin after she uses it?????

After dinner, the natural thing that follows is a bath because the cereal is usually all over her face, neck, hands, etc.  Anne Louise has moved out of her baby bathtub (that stopped as soon as she decided it was fun to kick the water everywhere) and into the regular bath tub.  She still LOVES her baths!

After bathtime, she sometimes gets a little playtime if we happen to have a few extra minutes.  Recently, her favorite thing is tummy time (believe it or not . . . and I NEVER thought we’d say that). 

Finally, after I nurse her, her Daddy gets her dressed and puts her down for the night (after she listens to her “friends” on the mobile sing the Carolina fight song, of course)!

Then its nighty-night for little Anne Louise until we wake her up to start the morning chaos!