The longest she can do tummy time is five minutes currently

Week 136 motherhood of 2.5 year old and 4 month old: 

• April 23: DH has been continuing to let me sleep in during the night by passing the baby to me to feed while in bed sideways and he goes to sleep on the sofa.  The baby sleeps for longer stretches this way, but we have to be careful because it means we are now co-sleeping…
• I can lift the baby up by her armpits now because her head/neck is so much stronger and sturdier!!  Yay!  She is basically doing tummy time when we hold her since she’s using those muscles a lot now.  It’s so much easier to pick her up by the armpits this way. 😀
• The baby has gunk in her neck and since we haven’t had time to bathe her yet, she smells lol…
• We had relatives in town and we brought the baby out for dim sum for the second time.  When we woke her up from her car seat slumber, she was okay with relatives holding her for the first time.  What a jolly baby (so far).
• Love how the baby can suck out a clogged breast so, so easily.  Such a big comparison compared to when I was using a pump last time.
• Apr 26:  The baby is shrieking and babbling and “talking” more these days.  She initiates smiling at us and is generally an easy sociable baby.  It’s neat to see the differences between the first and secondborn (there will always naturally be a comparison as humans raising kids).
• We brought the baby out to a restaurant for dinner for the first time since we had relatives visiting.  She actually did well and slept in the car seat for most of the meal.  It was only at the last 15 minutes of the meal (maybe we had been there for 1.5 hrs by that point) before she started crying.  She was turned away and facing the wall and her cries sounded like “Hey, where is everybody?  I can’t see people!”  Once we turned her around to face us, she pouted for a while but stopped crying and was okay again.  We left soon after anyway since we were done eating.
• The toddler has been throwing massive fits and favouring adults.
• Grandma brought her out for the second time for dim sum with her friends (but first time with more than 6 people) and the toddler, to our pleasant surprise, behaved well and didn’t act out.  She actually passed out after eating and slept at the table.  Grandma was afraid she would be cranky upon waking up, but she wasn’t!  What a true miracle.  She awakene without crying and actually got up to walk together to the door and to the car without incident.  This gives grandma such confidence to take her out again, which she did.  Today, she brought the toddler out for dim sum (and grocery shopping) with two old classmates.  The toddler cried a bit on this outing but otherwise was manageable too.  Yay!
• Even I myself have not brought the toddler out yet ..  😳.  Grandma and DH have each brought her out to dining out with friends/family and grocery trips.  I’ve only brought her to the park via stroller walks. 😅
• The past week, we’ve been placing the baby into the crib to sleep by herself during the night (after a few nights of restful side lying and nursing in bed — of us slept long stretches too — but ultimately I didn’t feel safe about it because one time I woke up on my side and she was sleeping behind me. Had I not been careful, I could have rolled onto her by accident and squished her in my sleep….)  She did super well last night and only woke up to have a feed.  The feeds have been short again (just like they were before she got RSV, which was what changed her feeding habits and duration), so I’m very hopeful that she is back to sleeping longer throughout the night and short feeds again.  Can’t believe how interrupting RSV was. 😞  (Having her sleep in our bed was probably a good transition to her getting used to sleeping on a real mattress as opposed to the bassinet surface).
• Along the same vein, the baby is gaining more squish again and at above 14 lbs again by our scale at home.  Yay!  We have about a few days left of size 1 diapers left to finish before we officially move into size 2 again.  She has belly flub that juts out above her diaper.
• Speaking of which, the toddler is still in diapers.  We recently opened a new box of size 4 for her.  DH asked me prior to opening the new box whether this was a good time to potty train her again and letting her use the pullup diapers.  It would be, logically speaking, but the toddler is not someone we can reason with and she keeps refusing to use the potty (maybe once a week she might try).  She actually knows the sensation of peeing, but keeps refusing to even try to want to use it.  Where do we go from here? 😩  When will she finally want to ditch the diapers and use the potty instead?
• Note: pullups are terrible for changing poop.  She pooped on two occasions while wearing the pullups and the poo was like stuck when we pulled it down.  It’s not like a diaper where you can just open it fully and wipe and dispose.
• We refer to a pullup as “underwear” and for her not to pee or poo in it when we first introduced it to her.  Unfortunately, she treats it as a diaper. 🤦🏻‍♀️
• We have been attending the EarlyON virtual programming once a day (sometimes twice).  The toddler continues to sing (partial) songs at home and always asks me to sing certain songs for her.  The past few days, it’s been the “good morning train” song and she likes hearing her name as well as her sister and all the people of the household in it (all her stuffed animals and our two turtles and even her peg people).
• I have been counting down the days until we can visit an EarlyON site again in person (relatives from Malaysia are visiting — one thing almost off the list, but waiting for the rescheduled 100 days celebration to be done first too before we expose the kids to other children again for fear of contracting germs from sharing toys/being in a classroom setting, etc.
• The toddler asks me almost every day whether we can go to an EarlyON.  Even she misses it too!  I tell her that I want to go there too but we have to wait and there’s just about two weeks left to wait.
• The toddler has a love and hate relationship with her sister currently.  She involves the baby as a family when she talks about us going out somewhere, and she brings the baby the black and white contrast book when the baby is doing tummy time (super sweet).  She’ll hold the baby’s hand sometimes (so cute).  She even told the baby not to eat the Oball toy when she saw her bringing it to her mouth.  However, when the toddler is not in good spirits, she’ll tell DH to hand the baby to me and vice versa or tell us to put the baby in the bouncer or on the playmat so that she can have our individualized attention on her.  She doesn’t let me feed the baby sometimes and wants me to play with her instead.  She tells me to bring her to the living room to play “weee ke ke ke” with her, a made up game where I hold her with her knees curled up and spinning around from side to side and going “weee” and then “ke ke ke” by bouncing her up and down.  She tries to delay me from feeding the baby and when I make a move to leave, she whines.  Eventually, she is okay with me leaving her to feed the baby.  We tell her she’ll get milk to drink after I feed the baby, which works.  Once the toddler knows I’m busy with the baby, she usually goes to grandma instead (or plays by herself if her cup is already full at that moment).
• The toddler loves prepping ingredients with grandma to make soup or dinner.  It’s a great activity for her.
• Recently, she also enjoys watching me wash the dishes after a meal lol.  She is patient and well-behaved when standing next to me on the learning tower at the sink.
• The toddler has been getting up early, like 7am or 6:30am, a few times this week…  Why?  She has been sleeping through the night mostly (or getting up once only) — knock on wood.
• The toddler cannot be coaxed to take a nap in her own bedroom anymore.  She does know she is tired in the afternoons and we’ll go upstairs to her room together but I would have fallen asleep for a cat nap while she’s wide awake and bouncing around and playing with her stuffed animals before she falls asleep.
• An interesting thing happened twice this week though.  We were at home and the toddler lay down on her belly on the playmat in the living room play area and she wiggled around on her hands and then she miraculously fell asleep right then and there.  She actually slept for more than an hour I that position (her usual position).  Then she did it again the next day (I cleared off the area for her to lay down and she slept there for 1.5 hrs this time).  Huh!  Lol.  It was great though.  We got in a midday break from her antics.
• The toddler chooses me a lot these days over her dad, which wasn’t the case a few months ago.  Having the second baby has definitely changed the dynamics of the first one.
• Snack of the week this week are Ritz cheese sandwiches (crackers)(that she bought with grandma on their post dim sum grocery trip).  We finished the durian mini cakes so DH will have to restock those at Costco.
• The toddler has learned to eat whole silvers of oranges.  Whereas we used t cut them up for her before, she’s now learned to bite into the silver and suck out the juice before continuing to bite it.
• She enjoys holding a whole chicken drumstick to eat (with a napkin to hold the bone part).
• The toddler eats mostly carbs and meat.  Veggies like green leafy ones rarely make it to her stomach (she’ll eat it and then spit it out).  She likes mushrooms (especially enoki ones) and boiled carrots, corn on the cob, and sweet potatoes though.
• She continues to drink my excess haakaa milk 🙌.  What a lucky kid to still get breastmilk.
• What the toddler has been going through these days (all the tantrums and refusals) truly can be characterized as the “terrible twos”. 😩  Now I get it.  Some moments really are hard, but they pass and we get through it.  Then she’s back to her normal, fun, angel self.
• When DH and I are talking about something, sometimes the toddler goes, “Are we talking about ___?”  She listens in on our English conversations and understands them.
• The baby is grabbing hold of almost everything these days.  When lying down in the playmat/jungle gym, her hands reached and was able to “bat” the monkey toy around.  She seemed amused by it.
• The baby always seems to look at her sister in awe or admiration.  It’s actually really amusing to us to see.  It’s almost like she’s thinking, “Wow, this bigger baby can talk and sing songs and reach for things.  I wish I could do that too!”  It’s cute to see. 🥰
• The baby is drooling so much this week.  She has to wear a bib otherwise the front of her clothes gets soaked.  She drools more than her sister did when she was a baby.  She loves sucking on her fingers these days.
• One day this week, the toddler actually requested me to put her to sleep for once and for real.  I was a bit afraid and hesitant since I’ve actually never put her to bed ever since she became a toddler (😱) — it’s always been DH.  But I did it!  She sat in my lap to drink water and I put her into the big sleep sack and we lay together on top of the Tweety bird long pillow.  She chatted and asked me to sing a few songs but then was quiet.  That’s when I knew she had fallen asleep.  It took less than 5 minutes!  So easy and effortless. 🙌  The next day though, she resumed her regular routine and it was DH who put her to bed.  (He almost always falls asleep with her in the room and doesn’t come out until 30 minutes later when he wakes up.)
• Even though the baby doesn’t do tummy time regularly enough, these days when we hold her, she is uptight in our arms so she is still essentially doing tummy time and practising her neck strength.  Yay.  Second baby means you are less anal about these skills because you know they eventually learn it and there’s just less time in the day to devote to them too when there are two kids to take care of.