Poop In The Tub: The Next Generation

Zachary Keeper, Producer

One of Life's Great Mysteries

Isabel: How do you trick-or-treat in space?

Halloween x 2

Halloween just rolled around. Isabel's a pro by now, but it was Zak's first. We bought pumpkins for everyone, but after carving Isabel's we decided one was enough! Isabel helped with exactly 1% of the actual pumpkin carving, then decided it was too yucky. The kids got to dress up on Friday for their school festivities, and then again on Saturday for the big H. We actually spent Halloween in Cleveland this year, and Kyle dressed up hoping to scare the kids!

Physical Fitness

Since my last post Zak has made leaps and bounds in his mobility. In a very short time he's gone from rolling, to military man creeping, to crawling, and even to being able to pull him self up to standing!

Crying It Out

Zak is not the good little sleeper that Isabel was at that age. This is probably our fault; we have not been nearly as consistent with him. He'll have a good night, followed by a week of bad nights. Saturday and Sunday nights he woke around 1AM and it took over an hour to get him to go back to sleep in his crib both nights. Finally, we'd had enough... time for some tough love.


The plan: at the first sound of a cry we'd go in and make sure he wasn't wet and give him his pacifier. If he fell asleep, great. If not, we'd go in every 5 minutes to make sure he had his paci and pat his back, then let him cry. Isabel was the wildcard; Kyle and I agreed that if she woke up, it was game over and we'd pick him up to keep him quiet and let her sleep.


The night started off badly. Kyle and I were watching tv at 9ish and Zak woke up screaming. Not a normal "I woke up and I'm not happy about it" scream, but one we hadn't heard before. Night terrors maybe? I went ahead and picked up him up and rocked him back to sleep. I don't consider this cheating on the plan, this was not normal crying people! Fast forward to 3AM. Zak wakes up crying (normally this time) and we execute the plan. And it goes... well! After about 20 minutes of this he fell back asleep and didn't wake up until after 7AM, and Isabel slept through all the racket. Now I'm not going to lie, it was an agonizing 20 minutes. A baby's cry is exactly tuned to cause the maximum distress to his parents' ears. But we stuck to it, and hopefully it will lead to better sleeping for all of us.