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Posts Tagged Jonathan

White Christmas

Dec 28

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

We normally travel to see family either right before or right after Christmas.  This year, however, a combination of a newborn baby and a Christmas morning blizzard consipred to keep us at home.  It was bad down here; up north in Missouri and Nebraska it was substantially worse, with the interstate closed between St. Joseph and Nebraska City.

So we stayed home, and actually had a very nice, slow, nuclear-family-focused Christmas.  Thomas received Mario and Sonic at the Winter Games from Santa, based on a very last-minute request.  Katherine got a Wonder Pets playset that she played with constantly for two days, and Jonathan received a Bumbo seat so that he can sit up with the rest of us during mealtimes and playtime.  Since he is almost as social as Thomas was (actually, he may be more so) he really enjoys being able to mug and smile at everyone during dinner.

We took advantage of the heavy snowdrifts and got out to sled on Saturday and Sunday.  The kids had a great time sliding down a steep hill near school, and I even got a few runs down the hill myself.  All in all, it was a very nice Christmas weekend!

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Weekend Fun

Dec 14

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

neighbors0920[1]The weekend was pretty full — we did some Christmas shopping, I spent an hour or so disassembling and storing the trampoline, we extracted a heavy carpet remnant from the basement to give to some friends, and did a bunch of craft projects and playing with the kids at home.

And I walked around with Jonathan.  A lot.

He’s really good overall.  Unfortunately, at 2 1/2 months he’s at a place where he wants to be up and wants to interact, but needs you to cart him around the whole time.  So aside from naps (which are getting shorter) and short stints in the swing and play area, someone is holding him pretty much all the time, and on the weekends that someone is me.  Add him to the strain of lifting and dragging a huge carpet remnant and lifting boxes full of steel pipes, and I’m pretty sore today.

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Brief Update Today

Dec 4

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

man_eats_giant_burger[1]Very little to report — Katherine had some good nights recently, but was up for two hours last night.  I’m making slow but steady progress on my game, Jonathan is sleeping a little better all the time, Thomas is doing well in school — we’re all slogging forward.  Just not in a very interesting way.

And I really want a Five Guys cheeseburger for some reason.

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Night Ranger

Nov 30

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

sleepwalking-man[1]The Thanksgiving trip was pretty good; as good as could be expected, really.  Jonathan was awake for significant chunks of the car ride, and when he was up in the car he wasn’t happy, but other than that there weren’t major problems.  We got to see both sides of the family — there was a family reunion for Robin’s dad’s side of the family in Weeping Water, which we were able to attend.  We then ate dinner with her parents in Lincoln and then traveled to Blair to stay overnight.  We ate breakfast and lunch with my folks and then headed home — unfortunately we were not able to see my brother and his family, who were unable to come up while we were at my parents’ house.

Katherine continued her streak of night wakings; it’s now been about a week and a half since she’s actually slept through all night.  Things are improving just slightly on that front, however.  The last few times I haven’t needed to intervene — she eventually goes back to sleep on her own, but it takes hours in some cases.  I’m hoping that she’s retraining herself and that we’ll be out of the woods soon.  In the meantime, however, I’m pretty close to the bottom of the barrel on sleep, which is unfortunate as Robin is also.

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Turkey Day

Nov 25

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

eat_ham_turkey[1]We’ll be taking the show on the road this Thanksgiving, although given how Katherine and Jonathan have been sleeping, we’re going to keep the overnight stays down to 1.

It will be interesting to see how Jonathan weathers the trip; this will be his first journey of any length.  I’ll make sure to post an update when we get back, although it may be Saturday rather than Friday due to travel issues.

Have a good holiday, everyone!

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Halloween Pictures

Nov 13

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

Halloween_K_Birthday 063uWe’ve taken a lot of photos recently; here are some from Halloween.  Jonathan was a sleeping frog most of the time, although he was a crying frog from time to time as well.  Thomas was Jango Fett, and Katherine was a princess (I forget which one).  The kids both greatly enjoyed the Halloween festivities at school, which included a parade and the chance to wear costumes all day, and we had a good time trick-or-treating for an hour or so.

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Sleep, or the Lack Thereof

Oct 26

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

sleep-main_Full[1]I’m not sure things have ever been worse on the sleep front for the Wigdahl kids.  Jonathan’s fussiness has ramped up; we had been very hopeful that he was going to be completely easy, but he’s turning out to be more like Thomas than Katherine on that front.  We’re still hoping that he’s just feeling under the weather or reacting badly to something Robin ate, or to the formula that we’ve supplemented him with.  We’re going to try soy formula for that and see if that improves things at all.

That leaves the two other kids.  After months of great sleep, Katherine is back in a rut of getting up in the middle of the night nearly every night.  Sometimes she goes back to sleep easily, and sometimes she stays up.  With her it seems more like a matter of habit — once she’s off track she stays off track until we manage to get her retrained, so we’re having to jump on that.

And Thomas, who’s always been the best sleeper, has been getting up way too early lately for varied and poorly-specified reasons, which makes him crankier.

All in all, it sucks.  I’ve been taking care of Katherine’s wakings while Robin deals with Jonathan, so neither of us are even close to getting a good night’s sleep.  I have high hopes that we’ll get things figured out and back on track, but for now there are a lot of yawns at Casa de Wigdahl.

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Jonathan Update

Oct 19

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | 1 Comment

Handsome boysBy popular request, here are some more pics of Jonathan!  He’s now over 8 and one half pounds and does a pretty good job of sleeping at night.  We’re still a bit behind on sleep overall, but getting to a point we can live with.

Unfortunately, several of us have been sick this last week — only Jonathan and I have dodged it so far, and I’m not 100% sure about me.  Thomas and Katherine seem to be doing better, so with luck Robin will improve soon as well.

More updates later!

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Birthweight Regained

Oct 6

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

Jonathan and Soccer 015rJonathan had his weight checkup appointment yesterday, and he passed with flying colors!  He’s back to his birth weight + 1 oz. at 10 days, faster than the 14 that they allot for it.  Of course, he had a gigantic poop immediately after the weighing, so some of that may not have been actual baby being weighed.

He’s been sleeping better the last few days; he feeds up in the late evening and then Robin is able to put him down for several hours of sleep at a time.  It’s a far cry from actually sleeping through the night, but it’s at least manageable.

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Very Tired

Oct 1

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family | No Comments

nin-baby-there-is-no-you-demotivational-poster[1]Although Thomas has been doting on baby Jonathan, Katherine is pretty aloof.  She takes interest in the baby so far only to ensure that he has either no gloves on or both gloves on; if one has fallen off she brings it to us and demands that it be put on.

The major issue for her has been the disruption in her routines.  Normally she would get much more focused Mommy time.  Mommy is now preoccupied with feeding Jonathan, and is often carrying him.  She had several substitute caregivers over the weekend, and now Daddy is taking her to school and picking her up.  For a young lady with autism, she is remarkably flexible, but change stresses every child, particularly one that can’t understand your explanations of why something is happening.  The net effect is that we’ve been getting more frustration- and stress-related behaviors such as shrieking, excessive emphasis on terminal plosives, and worst of all, sleep disruptions.  She woke Tuesday night at 2:50 am and didn’t go back to sleep.  At all.

I’ve been covering Katherine’s night wakings to let Robin focus on Jonathan’s, and it’s a good thing we decided to divide and conquer, since Tuesday night was disastrous.  We worked really hard, as hard as our mutual fatigue would allow, on making Wednesday very standard, low-stress, and happy for her, and I think it worked.  She slept great last night, and woke up happy and ready to go today!

The trick is to keep it up, and make sure that Katherine continues to feel loved and gets attention as she adapts to the new arrival.  I think we failed to take this into account as fully as we should have, but hopefully now that we have a good grasp on the issue we can make progress on resolving it.

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