Busy days!

We have been extremely busy these past few days! Stephen has been doing really well with using his potty before bathtime, so I decided that we would see how well he was really grasping the concept of the potty. On Thursday, when Stephen woke up, I told him that we were going to try using the potty all day like a big boy. That day, he went 5 times out of the 7 times he sat on his potty, and was DRY from waking until lunchtime. He did MUCH better than I could have even hoped!! Friday did not go as well. He went twice in the morning, but then refused to use the potty again for the rest of the day. In the evening, when we asked him if he was going to use the potty, he responded by yelling, "NOOOOOO!" And that was that. He hasn't used it since. Oh well. We don't want to push him on it - he clearly understands what he is supposed to do, and where, but he is very young to be potty training (most boys don't train now until 3 or even later!). We'll give it a shot again starting either tomorrow or Monday, depending on how we are all feeling about it.

On Thursday, I got the call to schedule Stephen's Sleep Study. The first available date they had was 5/17, and I also asked to be placed on the cancellation list. Yesterday, someone called to say that they had a cancellation for that night, and would we like to come? YES!! So we were set up to go at 8:30 pm. We thought that would be good because then he would be nice and tired, and would hopefully fall asleep more quickly. Ha! They started hooking him up to all of the monitors and wires after 9pm, and once we turned on an episode of Stephen's favorite show on the portable DVD player (THANK YOU Rick and Deb!!!), he settled down and let them do what they needed to do. He was pretty good about not pulling things off, except for the one monitor called the Mustache:

The monitor piece that George is wearing in the photo was actually ON Stephen at one point. It was a little too big for his face, so he pulled it down and was sucking on it instead. The purpose of the piece is to monitor breathing out of the nostrils and mouth... We waited to put the second one on after he was asleep, and then they also put on a canula to give him a little oxygen while he was sleeping (SOP at the Sleep Lab).

He managed to get tangled up in the wires about half a dozen times during the night, and of course did his normal night-waking activities. I was reminded why we have almost never slept in the same room as Stephen - he is LOUD!!! Between the snoring, the crying, the moving around, and the hooting as he is falling back asleep, I am almost positive I didn't make it into REM sleep the whole night. The technicians were extraordinarily kind and helpful, and said that Stephen's activities were very typical of the kids that go in there for the studies, so we are sure that we have done the right thing in putting him through the study. We should hear in about 2 weeks what the next step is!

Oh, and for anyone wondering, our brave little dinosaur-lover seemed to be the most well-behaved and calm child there last night. The little guy next door was screaming for almost an hour AFTER Stephen fell asleep, and woke up screaming multiple times during the night. Maybe THAT contributed to my sleep issues last night too??

Here are some pictures from this week. I don't remember when I took the first one, but the second one was on Day one of Potty Camp, and Stephen was watching his show in the morning. Also, that shirt did not make it through the whole day of the great potty experiment.