The Birkeland Family Blog

Hey guys.....It's me Jack Jones. I am 20 months old now and I keep my mom going all day long. My favorite things: 1. dressing up (I just want to be just like my sister. Can you blame me?) 2. my bottle (I totally con my mom into giving me one everyday sometimes more...he he :)) 3. reading books (The Mitten, No David, Animal picture books) 4. brooms and mops (My mom thinks I will grow up to be a janitor one day. Thanks mom for having such high hopes for me) 5. Spatulas and tongs (My favorite thing is to unfold all the clean laundry piece by piece with salad tongs. Good times folks. The look on my mom's face is priceless) 6. Playing in the toilet. (You would think that with all the scolding my mom does the novelty would wear off....oh no I love getting the toilet paper all soggy and sweeping across the bathroom walls and floors. There's nothing better than being a kid.) 7. Seeing myself pee. (I have to admit I do like this. My mom takes me to the potty and I say, "I peed...

After 1 year of roughly 10-12 sick visits to the drs. and 6 months of NO SLEEP it finally came down to having a tonsilectomy and adenoidectomy. When I say 6 months of no sleep I mean 6 whole months. Emmi would go to bed no problem but after being asleep for about 2 to 3 hours the wakings would begin. We would be waked by panic screaming. When we went to her room to comfort her she would say she was scared. She wouldn't talk about dreams or anything. We would lay by her and she would quickly fall back to sleep. That was happening over and over all night long. We have been zombies for so long. We read every sleep book in the planet. Then she would be sick again. We would try to "sleep train" her over and over with different techniques. One was to give her one chance to come out of her room, then after that was to lock her in her room. That seemed awful and cruel but we thought it will just take a couple of bad nights. Well, the panic screaming got worse and worse. Not bette...