To start out with, I'm sorry last week's blog post went missing! It was the pictures from our week in Utah, but I am not seeing it anymore. I will upload them again into this post and hope it sticks.
Now onto the disappearing snorts and warts. A bit of a TMI post, but if you have snoring or wart problems in your life perhaps it might help. (If not, you may as well skip to the pictures.) Jared has had a persistent case of the snores over the past 5 or 6 years--around the time Jack was born and Jared started residency. For a while it was easy to blame "stress," since nothing else had really changed. But the snoring got progressively louder and worse, even after residency ended a few years ago. It got so bad that my sleep was really taking a hit, since the snoring would begin immediately upon Jared falling asleep, and he tends to fall asleep, well, immediately after we turn the lights out. We tried all the easy fixes--different sleep positions, nasal strips, etc. Nothing helped much. The research I started doing on snoring indicated that if the snoring is every night no matter what, and is nonstop, it's probably a good idea to do a sleep study to rule out potentially dangerous conditions. Jared was not a fan of this idea at all, so he assured me it was probably just related to a little weight gain, and he would prove it by getting the weight off. Which he did for a while, but the snoring continued.
Fast forward to 2024. The snoring is worse than ever. It's some of the worst snoring you've ever heard. The only worse snoring there is comes from his dad, which indicates to me that this problem probably won't just get better on its own. My sleep is suffering deeply unless we sleep in separate rooms, which I know lots of couples with a snoring situation make work, but I just would rather not if possible. My quality time with Jared is too limited in this stage of parenthood as it is. And even if earplugs did help me, which they don't much, I can't hear the baby waking up if I have earplugs in. So in sum, it's been a bit of a dilemma. Thought I'd share what so far seems to be a welcome solution in case there's anyone else out there in this predicament.
First, the strategy. Whenever I suggested a sleep study, Jared would get defensive. "I'm too young to have sleep apnea. A study is annoying. It's expensive and will just show that nothing's wrong. Some people just snore!" And since he's a doctor, it's tough to change his mind on anything medically related, even if I'm coming at it with research of my own to back me up. But again, my quality of life was suffering. So I played the birthday card. "All I want for my birthday is for you to do a sleep study. Please don't get me anything else. All I want is to sleep soundly in the same room as my lovey dovey." (All the heart eyes and flattery.) He still got defensive, which I think is pretty silly because my issue here wasn't about him snoring, it was about me, the love of his life, losing sleep every night. I told him I was letting him know a month in advance so he could try whatever other ideas he might have to get rid of the snoring, but if it wasn't gone by my birthday then this was indeed the birthday request I would ask of him. This finally lit the necessary fire under his bum and he ordered all sorts of devices to try to prove a sleep study would not be necessary. I will be honest and say I didn't expect any of them to work.
But alas! On night one of Jared's personal project snore-be-gone, he tried a snore nasal spray that helped substantially. It cut the snore volume fully in half--maybe more. Pretty great! I honestly would have taken that as a win enough and let him off the hook, but he still had two new tricks he wanted to try. On night two, there was a funny-looking chin strap. This did very little--possibly even less than the snore strips he's used nightly for the past 3 years. But on night 3 he pulled out the big guns. "Snore RX" the package read, and inside was a monstrous mouth guard that he boiled and then fitted into his jaw with a flourish. He seemed very optimistic about this one. And with good reason! It finally happened. I fell asleep next to my husband to the sound of (for the first time in years) absolutely nothing! Praise be! I poked him a few times to make sure he was really asleep, but sure enough he was out and silent. I woke up the next morning feeling something new. It was a feeling called . . . refreshed? The first time I've slept through the night uninterrupted in quite a while--except for the stint when Jared was sick/contagious and I made him sleep in the guest bedroom. The next night, last night, was another Snore RX success story. I think the snores have disappeared for good (knock really hard on wood)! It is very strange to turn my light off at night and feel something other than dread that the snores will arrive in my ear holes at any moment. Anyway, this post isn't a Snore RX advertisement. It's a "play the birthday card on your snoring spouse sooner than I did" advertisement. The solution will be different for everyone. For my snoring brother it was having his tonsils and adenoids removed as an adult. For my snoring dad it was getting on a C-pap machine. For some the snore strips you can grab at any drugstore do the trick. For others, ear plugs or sleeping in separate bedrooms might be the right solution. And for us, for now, Snore RX! I'm so happy. Happy almost birthday to me. And thank you Jared. You truly are the medical genius of this century😏
Can't end this post without exposing my own unflattering secret. Warts. Plantar warts. All over my big toe. For years and years. Gross. Probably as many years as Jared's been snoring. Took those warts to a doctor to have them frozen off a few times. They always grew back, and were starting to spread to the next toe over and cause me pain. So a month ago I started attacking them with apple cider vinegar on a cotton swab taped over the warts every night. It's taken a full month and been kinda painful, but they are mostly gone. I tried this method a year ago and they turned black (gross) but I never cut or filed them down, and they just ended up coming back. This time I'm attacking them much harder and they will be destroyed completely forever. You'll see. You'll all see. Our 30s are looking very glamorous on us haha.
And now on a more wholesome note, some pictures from Utah! I will have to be sparse with the captions because it is well past my bedtime. Busy day.
Happy Easter! I missed posting last week because we were busy, busy, busy on Spring Break in Utah. It was a very fun and productive trip. I am hoping to write an extra post this week about our Utah trip. For now, I have so many pictures from our Easter celebrations in Washington the week before Spring Break, so here they are:
This is the first year ever where I have sat down to make summer vacation plans ahead of time, other than for our yearly trip to Utah. It began when I realized there is a possibility this will be our last summer living in Washington and we really haven't explored all that much. (We could be here a few more summers, but we are always keeping our ears open for Utah jobs.) There are quite a few nearby beautiful places on our list we haven't seen yet, including Mt. Rainier, Olympic National Park, Forks, Victoria Canada, and Seabrook. It feels like we were constantly exploring when we lived in Wyoming but we haven't as much here, even though there is more to see here. We are chalking it up to me being pregnant/sick and us having a car-hating newborn for most of the time we've lived here. This summer is our time to make it happen, so realizing that vacation rentals fill up FAST, I started considering all our options for a low-key 2-night Washington family trip.
Our first plan was to rent a rustic cabin on Mt. Rainier. But in June it can still be snowy there, in July we will be in Utah, and August is an expensive month to rent on Mt. Rainier. Plus Alice is at an age where we likely wouldn't be able to hike much. So we ditched that plan and shifted our focus to Olympic National Park. We found a cute little lake with some VRBO lake houses to rent near the park entrance. But this vacation option would require a LOT of driving. It would take 3-4 hours to get there from our house, and then each day would require hours of driving to see all we want to see in that part of Washington. Alice isn't ready for that kind of vacation and it would likely be miserable. So we pivoted to something not on our exploration list at all but that I'm really excited about: a staycation on a small lake 10 minutes from our house.
Staying in a house right on a little lake with a private dock is at the very top of my Washington must-do list. Although I initially thought it would be nice to stay on a lake in a new area of Washington so we could combine the lake experience with exploring somewhere new, I realized that with young kids, staying at a home base will give everyone the best chance at being able to actually relax and enjoy ourselves. We can hang out on the dock while Alice naps, play on the beach and take turns paddle boarding, and if for some reason Alice has a terrible time sleeping in a new location at night, we won't have to abandon the trip or be sleepless zombies--we can just have one of us zoom home for her to sleep at night and then zoom back first thing in the morning. It's a peaceful little lake I have always loved. Very excited to have a baby-friendly family trip on the docket for this summer.
We are also working out the logistics to book a one-night stay in a fancy spa hotel in the mountains to celebrate our 10-year anniversary a year late. 10 years just came at a weird time with a nursing baby, and we still don't feel comfortable leaving Alice longer than a night or two. So instead of a long or exotic anniversary trip, we're going to do a short but fancy one somewhere we'd never be able to justify the price on otherwise, but in the name of "10 year anniversary trip" it will be a really cool experience. (You can look up "Posthotel Leavenworth" if you're curious. It's giving "Harry Potter Prefect Bathroom" vibes and that's why we picked it haha. It's also in a Bavarian town, and since we met in German class and honeymooned in Germany, this option felt cute for our 10-year anniversary.)
It will be good to have something to look forward to each month of our summer this year. Last summer dragged onnnnn and onnnn and was kind of brutal to be honest. We'll see if planning out some trips and a one-week sports camp for Jack will be the magic recipe for a happier summer. As always, I'll keep you posted.
Happy spring! We are starting to get blossoms and buds on our trees and bushes. We even had temperatures in the 70s over the weekend. Most of the forecast for this next week is low 50s with constant rain so I'm going to bask in the last day or two of sunshine we have. Nothing crazy to report from our week. Jared has a really nasty cough that he can't seem to kick. I can't remember a winter when he's had so many annoying little constant sicknesses. Jack and Alice are great and adorable. I thrifted my first giant original painting. It's not signed and the frame is seriously awful (plastic that looks like fake orangey wood, nailed right into the canvas). But the painting itself is really lovely. It's moody earth tones of a river winding through a forest and reminds me of Granite Falls where we live. Eventually I'll get it reframed and it will live in our entryway. Anyway, here are some pictures from our week:
^^Alice blowing a kiss in her adorable new spring dress on Sunday
Daylight savings! We did it. We saved the daylight. I'm happy that I can take Savvy dog for a walk while it's still light outside now instead of the creepy damp dark walks I've been doing for the past 4 months. Jared usually gets home from work kind of late (but he only works 4 days a week so it's a tradeoff). By the time he gets home it's a quick dinner and then the kids' bedtime. Jared does bedtime so he can have a little time with the kids while I take Savvy dog for her walk.
The first week or two of this month, Jack was having a really rough time with sleep, which hasn't happened in years so it caught us off-guard. He was scared and would call out to us all evening until he fell asleep, and then he'd wander into our room sometime after midnight every night, scared, and spend the rest of the night with us. It got bad enough that Jared was having to lay in Jack's room until he fell asleep, which could take a while. This last week I had an epiphany and offered to take over the nightly "check-ins" instead of Jared and it immediately fixed the problem. When Jack was having his last bout of sleep issues nearly three years ago, what finally fixed it was doing regular check-ins (every 15 minutes in the beginning, then every 20 minutes, and finally every 30 minutes for the past two years). It's usually between 1 and 3 checks before he's asleep so not a huge deal. Jared would do the weekday check-ins, and I would do bedtime and check-ins on the weekends. When it's my turn, I always have Jack help me set a phone timer so I can be right on time for the next check. He has a clock in his room he can see from his bed, with dots at the 15, 30, 45, and 60 minute marks. This helps him to visualize when he'll see mom or dad again (on the top dot and bottom dot).
Unfortunately, Jared has historically been kind of spotty about his check-ins. He has a harder time remembering to set his timer, or check a clock to be there on time. It's been a sticking point because not only is it frustrating for Jack, but it's frustrating for ME because when it happens multiple times Jack will get scared and leave his room to go looking for someone. Usually it's me he goes looking for, and then I basically have to do bedtime all over again when it's supposed to be my evening off. So anyway, Jack was getting deeper into this cycle of being scared alone in his room in the evenings and in the middle of the night, and it occurred to me that since he's still so young, having the routine of one of us being there reliably when we said we would be there might be more important than we realized (Jack's typically pretty flexible as far as routines go, but he's still just a young guy and having some reliability in a day is important for him). So we tried switching things up for a week--instead of Jared doing bedtime and check-ins on weekdays and me doing both on weekends, now Jared is doing bedtime every night and I am doing check-ins every night. Again, this fixed the problem pretty much immediately, and we'll continue with this pattern until it's time to tweak again. I love a quick parenting win.
Well that was a long sleep tangent. Maybe it can help someone who has a young kid with sleep issues. The check-in method has helped us out of rough bedtime phases multiple times now. Worth a try. In Alice news, baby girl is communicating better and better every week. She is obsessed with the web swing we installed in Jack's playroom for his birthday. No real swing-related injuries so far, but we're going to put a hook on the ceiling to hang it up when both the kids are home together. They do great with the swing one at a time, but when they're both in there the chances of little bumps and toddler fits go up. Very cute when they're both on there and I'm pushing them, but if I can't be in there to supervise it feels dicey. It's been a fun week though. We love our happy babies.
