Dear Jess, 

My youngest son turned six months old recently and I can confidently say I am starting to get the hang of this multiple kid shtick. Sure, every few months during a sleep regression, teething episode, or reflux flare-up, our regular routine is uprooted and our house devolves into chaos, but for the most part I’m in the groove.

During the first few months, bedtime was the part of the day that caused me the most stress. It seemed like every night when it was bedtime for my toddler, the baby decided that he needed to go to be rocked to bed RIGHT. NOW. I wanted to keep things as normal as possible for my toddler so he didn’t feel ignored, but that was hard when he kept whining at every step of our bedtime routine. With my husband working second shift, it was up to me to juggle both of their nighttime routines.

Enter Calvin’s routine chart. I made these a few months ago and it has made the majority of our mornings and nights run a lot smoother. There have been so many benefits of using these charts:

Dear Jess,

Teaching my toddler my second language, Cantonese, has been hard. My main hurdle has been remembering to speak it as much as possible. My husband doesn’t speak Cantonese, so our house is filled with English with a dusting of Chinese every now and then.

I found that doing a game or activity with the kiddo has helped spark more conversations or teaching moments in Cantonese. Carving out 20 minutes each day has started a habit which I hope will snowball into speaking more Chinese in general.

One game that I created recently is basically the shell game where you have three cups and a ball and the object of the game is to guess which cup the ball is under after shuffling them. To make it more fun for my three year old, I turned it into what he calls the “Mousey” game.