Red 40

Yesterday was a great day for Tara with Camden. He was well behaved, didn't have any potty accidents and took discipline well. Why so good one day and so bad another? She was reading on one of her message boards about other moms with troublesome three year olds and some intersting observations they've made. Apparently a common food additive called Red Dye #40 can have negative affects on a childs behavior. Not all kids...but some. We've decided to give it a little test with Camden.

Recently he's fallen in love with Crystal Light Fruit Punch and has been drinking it for almost every meal. It has no sugar or any other 'bad things' I thought we wanted to keep him away from. It does however contain Red40. Yesterday, he had no Crystal Light Fruit Punch and was an angel. We're going to keep him off of anything with Red40 as best we can for the next few days and see what happens. We'll have to be diligent to keep track of what he eats and stay away from Red40....it's in a lot of food.

Here are a few of the stories we read yesterday that helped us decide to give this a try:
http://floridadalton.com/files/RedDyeAwareness.htm
http://lifeaslou.blogsome.com/2008/01/21/red-40-and-cracking-the-bad-behavior-code

We'll report back in a few days and document our findings for Camden. Our plan is to keep him off Red40 for a few days then give him some Fruit Punch (which we guess has a lot of it) and see what happens. Pray for us!! We really want this to be our solution for keeping our sweet well-behaved boy around more consistently!

Trip over the Mountains

We took a trip over Snoqualmie pass this weekend to have a birthday party for Camden at Grandma and Grandpa Cochran's house with family. It was a very fun party with balloons and streamers and dump trucks and dirt cake and cup cakes and drums.

On the way home we started hearing the reports that there was a snow slide across the road several miles ahead and to expect multi-hour delays. By this point it was too late to take an alternate route so as traffic began to slow to a crawl we feared that little Shelby would wake up and be hungry at a point where we couldn't pull over to feed her. Tara said a quick Prayer asking God to help Shelby stay asleep until we could feed her. She slept the entire way home (about 4 hours) The delays ended up only putting us behind 'schedule' by an hour. What a blessing!!

Camden was the perfect little traveler as well. He didn't sleep the whole way but he quietly played in the back seat and didn't make a fuss at all even though we didn't stop at all to stretch our legs (for fear of waking Shelby, who can make her displeasure widely known)


The Dirt Cake


Birthday Boy


The Dump Truck


The birthday boy and mom

A fun time was had by all!

Camden Tumbling

Here is a video of how athletic Camden is now. He'll turn three next week. We're looking forward to spring and summertime weather so we can all go outside and play instead of being cooped up in the house all the time!!

March Updates

It's been a long time since our last update so I thought I'd just jot a few things down real quick. The past few nights Shelby has had a good long evening stretch of sleep. last night it was from about 8:30pm until about 1am. In an ideal world, that should be the same time Tara and I go to bed and sleep as long as we can. unfortunately with dishes, laundry, and TV to catch up on, we typically stay up later than we'd like.

Camden is starting to become a bit more independent in his play time which is nice. Sometimes Shelby demands so much attention that we feel Camden gets short changed in his one on one time. We try to have time set aside for one on one without Shelby, but it's hard unless both of us are home at the same time.

Tara goes back to work one week from Monday. I'm sort of looking forward to a change in schedule so I can be home in the morning with the kids, but I'm a little afraid of bedtime with Tara home on her own. Camden has been doing better with bedtime, but sometimes can be a real challenge. Add that to a cranky two month old who needs to be held most of the evening could make for some LONG evenings for Tara. We're trying to decide if we will switch back to our current schedule during the summer so I can be home for dinner and bedtime like I am now. If we stick with my normal schedule then we can all sleep in and have the morning together all summer.

Camden was doing very well for a while with his potty training, but once he got the reward of a Hot Wheels Car, he stopped cold turkey. Tara has been making sticker charts for him. He gets one sticker each time he uses the potty, once he fills his sticker chart, gets gets the reward that is drawn at the bottom. A lollipop, a Fruit Snack bag, or a Hot Wheels Car. For some reason once he got the car he decided he was done. We'll keep at it but he's not really interested in wearing his big boy underwear anymore (which helped him a lot)

Camden will turn three next week and I think he understands that. We've been talking about it at home and they have been talking about it at daycare as well. He's quite articulate and speaks in complete sentences most of the time. He has a fascination with plural words and most of the time will correct us if he thinks we need it. "Do you want cereal for breakfast?" "No, I want cereals"

That's all for now. Stay tuned for some videos. We're going to try to post some on Blogger and see how they turn out.