Christmas 2015

Christmas 2015 with Dexter was a truly awesome one! We thought that he was really into the spirit of it last year... well that was nothing compared to this year.

We took a trip to see Santa (and Dexter was absolutely thrilled that the present he got turned out to be a racing car! He'd "asked for one of those"...)

He had his first little acting role in the nativity at nursery and my little reindeer proper rocked it...

He went to bed on Christmas eve in his new reindeer jammies all excited after leaving Santa a mince pie and glass of milk to keep his energy levels up whilst delivering presents to our house.

And despite not doing the typical kid thing of getting up at the crack of dawn, he was buzzing to come into the room and see what he had got. There was so much he didn't know what to play with first, so he played with everything. All at once.

As a grown up, Christmas can be a little lacklustre but as a parent it is so fulfilling watching your child enthusiastically ripping off paper and being so enthralled with what's inside. That was definitely the best part of my Christmas this year.

And in return Dexter, brought some new things to the table for us:

• The question 'why?' - mostly to things that don't require an explanation. Always with the 'why?'  I was wondering when this stage was going to hit.
• Dry nights!!!!!! It's only been a couple of months since Dexter did a lot of growing up and not only ditched the dummy, but daytime nappies as well but this past week or so he seems to have cracked holding it all night - yippee! bye bye pull-ups

Ditching the dummy.

You only had one for bed. It had been part of your life for over 3 years. It comforted you. But you'd had it longer than we wanted you to.... to be honest, in an ideal world you'd never have had one at all. But when you were a baby and were suffering from colic it helped soothe you. At the time, it was a means to an end. After so long, we came to the conclusion that it wasn't really fair to take it away from you when you didn't understand why. So we had left it until this point. You were old enough to understand what we are telling you and agree to the decision.

Last Friday night you we very cooperative in leaving your dummies in an envelope outside the fairy door on our skirting board. We had stories as normal and you were excited to find out what the dummy fairy would leave you in return the next day.

That night, I listened to you cry yourself to sleep over the baby monitor. Literally! You made no attempts to get out of bed, you were such a good boy and really persevered. But it was hard.

The next few nights you asked for it. You said you weren't a big boy anymore and you wanted them back. We explained that they had gone now and we couldn't get them back. You accepted this and went to sleep quite quickly with no tears or fuss.

A week has gone by and you don't even bother to ask anymore. You have broken the habit. I am so proud of you.

But ditching the dummy has brought about something completely new for us all. Until that point you still napped every day. For about two hours per day. Now, no dummy seems to equal no naps. You haven't napped since we took them away. Dear god what have we done haha....