January Recap

• Did a no sugar challenge with the gym and cut out sweets/desserts/candy and sugary drinks.  Life seems to go by slower when I can't have dessert, but I've seen enough positive change (shedding some baby weight and increased resolve/self control) that I'd like to sort of keep it up.  I'm thinking about continuing, but allowing myself one sweet thing a week or sweets only allowed on weekends or something.  

• Continued Malay language lessons ~2x/week.  We're in phase 2 of our program now, which means working on wordless picture books and being able to describe what we see in the pictures and tell the story in Malay.  I'm happy with our progress since I could not even come close to doing that after 4 years of Spanish classes every day of high school.  But we're still very slow and make lots of mistakes when attempting to talk in sentences.  Lots of work yet to be done!

• Started a ladies-only class at the box two mornings a week so I've been going while Justin stays home with the kids.  It's a nice break for me from my mom duties and fun to be at the box more.  I'm looking forward to making some fitness gains this year after taking a complete break from being active for about 8 months (from 18 weeks pregnant until about 3.5 months postpartum).

• Hosted the championship playoff tournament for the CrossFit 673 League.  It was a fun and dramatic way to wrap up the season.  Pictures here.

• Had a weekend getaway in Miri, Malaysia for some CrossFit friends' wedding.  The 'getaway' part turned out to not be as holiday-esque as I had hoped since Justin caught a flu bug and was in bed all day at the hotel, but the boys and I had fun staying out of Daddy's hair at the mall and pool.  

• Started sleep training Cameron.  Remember how I did that post about him being an angel miracle baby and sleeping 5+ hours basically from week 3?  Yeah.  Well.  Unfortunately when he turned 3.5-4 months old he started sleeping a lot worse.  Apparently it's a thing (they call it the 4 month sleep regression).  Only it's not really just a phase, it's a permanent developmental change in babies' sleep behavior so he won't just grow out of it.  I didn't know it was a thing since my first go around James wasn't really sleeping well enough before that point for me to notice a regression.  But this was a marked change- he still was eating only one time during the night but began waking every 3 hours and needed us to give him his pacifier until he returned to sleep.  Soooo after about a month of that we decided it was time to start some CIO with him so he can learn to fall asleep without us giving him his pacifier.  On the first night of it I already was anxiously telling Justin, "I don't know if it's working!" but now we're 4 days in and he's already dropped all those extra night wakings except for the one time he nurses in the early morning.

• James has been taking huge strides in language over the last month or so.  He repeats many words we say, is learning new words at a steady rate, and can talk in 2-3 word phrases, though he spends most of the time repeating the same one word about 10 times in a  row.  :)  His most recent achievement is being able to say "I love oooo" which melts my heart every single time.  His favorite things to talk about are numbers and body parts.  Justin has also recently taught him to "fight" with light sabers so he requests to do that at least a couple times each day.  His favorite book in the whole wide world is Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems, a.k.a. "No Bus" according to James.  We tried potty training for a few days early in the month, but I gave up because he became really resistant and tantrumy about trying to go on the potty, so I decided to wait a little bit before we try again.