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one year.
On Thanksgiving Day, the prince was one year old.
I'm still too tired to talk much right now about what's going on that's not awesome. Mostly things are awesome. He is bright and cheerful and full of laughs and smiles and loves us and is learning to walk and generally doesn't mean to bite us, it's just that he doesn't understand the difference between biting us and giving us kisses.
But he hasn't been sleeping well. A month or so ago day care moved him to a new room, a sort of bridge between infants and toddlers, and busted him down to one nap a day, and a couple of weeks later he started waking up in the middle of the night again - after several months of sleeping from 7pm to 6am without a peep - and taking ages to get back down. I assumed the regression was because he was on the cusp of walking, but it kept happening night after night and he kept not walking independently and one does eventually have to revise one's assessment. I think the last time I posted, when I said two Friday nights ago was the worst night ever, was the morning after the night where we spent two hours trying to get him back to sleep and just getting screamed at, and I finally gave him Benadryl, and even half an hour after that he was still screaming in my face (we'd also given him Tylenol against any teething or growing pains, and he didn't have a fever and didn't want a bottle - I mean we tried everything), and Himself about fucking lost it and just needed the crying to stop, and I grabbed a couple of pillows and the blanket off my side of the bed and went and lay down on the floor in the baby's room with him in the crook of my arm because I couldn't sit in the rocker and hold him or I'd drop him when I dozed off. About an hour later (so - 1am?) he was finally soundly enough asleep that I could put him back in the crib and go crawl back into my own bed, and maybe four hours after that when he woke up and cried I went and sacked out on the floor with him again until Himself came in to get him and objected that he hadn't meant to chase me away. It was rough.
However, Himself realized that the regression coincided pretty neatly with the buildup of the sleep deficit from only having one nap per day at day care - kid was only 11 months old, and apparently the transition from two naps to one nap is more usually a sort of 15-month milestone. So we asked day care to put him down for two naps per day, and after only a small amount of resistance they agreed, and wouldn't you know, the kid did not object to taking two naps, and in fact he seemed to be sleeping a little better.
Meanwhile, Himself and I have begun the conversation about whether to have a second child (hypothetically, pulling the goalie next summer), and I shouldn't have been - and I guess I wasn't, really - surprised, but it was a fucking disaster. Short version: I want another kid, he really doesn't think he can, there isn't a way to achieve any kind of compromise on that sort of question, we went to talk to his therapist about it, the door isn't completely closed and locked but I really need to find a way to be prepared to accept that it's not going to happen and even when the prince is at his most impossible the idea of not doing all this again is devastating to me. The way he loves and trusts us is like a narcotic but not dangerous. How could I not want more? I can't talk about it any more right now. I feel queasy even having thought about it this much. It leaves me helplessly distraught. I hate it.
So we got home from that appointment with the therapist to where my in-laws had been babysitting, and while the four of us were waiting for dinner to be delivered we heard the prince crying and I went up to begin the process of getting him back to sleep and he was covered in puke. We got him cleaned up and changed his jammies and his linens and started some laundry and I got him back to bed before everyone else was done with dinner. He didn't have a fever, so we believed he had coughed until he vomited (the cough from his bronchiolitis a couple months ago has been lingering). The incident did not repeat itself, anyway.
Oh hang on: That night he threw up was Thursday 17th, which means the awful Friday night was the night after, not the week before.
Anyway, we put him down for two naps each of the days that weekend, and things were going a lot better, and Himself ran into the day care director at Whole Foods and answered honestly when she asked how the prince was doing - and she agreed to back him up when he insisted on two naps at drop-off the next morning. So Monday 20th the kiddo had two naps and that was a step toward improvement. I was violently ill with some sort of stomach bug, though - Himself did a whole day solo because I didn't feel safe even picking the baby up, I was so unsteady.
And then Tuesday afternoon 21st, day care called to say the prince had a 102-degree fever. Damn it all. So we went and got him, and took him to urgent care, on the way to which he threw up in the car, and at which he threw up in the exam room waiting for the doctor, so of course we kept him home Wednesday also - he slept most of the day but required one of us to be holding him, so we took turns teleworking and baby-cradling - and then Thursday, Thanksgiving, was his birthday. I no longer remember how he slept between Saturday and Wednesday nights, but he had a nap Thursday morning that was so long we never did get to a second nap that day - so Thursday night we put him to bed early, and he seems to have treated bedtime as his second nap. That is, he woke up three hours later and it was a three-hour project to get him back down again. Friday he resisted his second nap but I insisted - insisted - that he take it, and I think Friday night might have gone a little better? Saturday night he did okay but woke up at 4:30 Sunday morning, at which point I went and brought him back into the big bed with us, because I knew he'd sleep if he had snuggles but I needed more sleep myself. Same thing happened Sunday night into Monday morning.
Of course we can't let this keep going on if we don't want it to go on indefinitely, which we don't, so - and with the encouragement of the pediatrician, who reminds us that nothing is going to work the first time we try it and the only way to achieve normalcy is to make a plan, agree on it, and stick to it ruthlessly - we decided no more bringing him back to our bed and in fact no more picking him up and trying to rock him back to sleep, because what happens is he goes right to sleep in our arms and then wakes up when we put him down. Lather, rinse, repeat for an hour and a half until we give up in exhausted frustration and the kid cries for half an hour and then goes back to sleep. I don't want to get all I-told-you-so with my husband but I've been thinking for weeks that the solution to that problem is to cut straight to the end of the page and let the half-hour of crying come first and the rest of the two hours of us being awake not happen at all. Which is now what the plan is. Our being in there just makes the baby angrier every time we put him down or don't pick him up in the first place - so what I did when he woke up at 1 am last night was go in to be sure he wasn't on fire, pat him once, not pick him up, and leave the room. Of course he was mad. He cried for half an hour, went back to sleep, woke up several times over the next twenty minutes to cry for a couple of minutes at a time, and then was quiet for the rest of the night. And we weren't getting up and lying back down and rocking him and standing over the crib patting him and thinking we'd got it but hearing him cry the moment we thought the nursery door was closed behind us and we were clear - none of that. It wasn't fun knowing he was crying for an hour and I wasn't able to stop it, but it was a lot less un-fun than trying and failing, is one way of describing it.
Still, I'm exhausted. And sick - I hadn't really recovered from the stomach thing when I picked up a head-and-chest thing, so today I've been trying not to cough because although there's gummy crud in my chest and I want it out, coughing really hurts. My throat is fine; the pain is in my actual chest, which is rare for me and I don't like it. This is a lungier thing than my usual cough. I think if I were sick or tired I wouldn't be quite as unhappy as I am right now, but because I'm both, I'm having to work really hard not to resent my kid and my husband and not to give in to snappish anger and not to just drink wine and eat ice cream and think "fuck it" about everything else.
So look at that, it turns out I had a lot to say about things that aren't awesome after all. But listen: Mainly this kid is awesome, like I said. And now he is one. ♥ ♥ ♥
I'm still too tired to talk much right now about what's going on that's not awesome. Mostly things are awesome. He is bright and cheerful and full of laughs and smiles and loves us and is learning to walk and generally doesn't mean to bite us, it's just that he doesn't understand the difference between biting us and giving us kisses.
But he hasn't been sleeping well. A month or so ago day care moved him to a new room, a sort of bridge between infants and toddlers, and busted him down to one nap a day, and a couple of weeks later he started waking up in the middle of the night again - after several months of sleeping from 7pm to 6am without a peep - and taking ages to get back down. I assumed the regression was because he was on the cusp of walking, but it kept happening night after night and he kept not walking independently and one does eventually have to revise one's assessment. I think the last time I posted, when I said two Friday nights ago was the worst night ever, was the morning after the night where we spent two hours trying to get him back to sleep and just getting screamed at, and I finally gave him Benadryl, and even half an hour after that he was still screaming in my face (we'd also given him Tylenol against any teething or growing pains, and he didn't have a fever and didn't want a bottle - I mean we tried everything), and Himself about fucking lost it and just needed the crying to stop, and I grabbed a couple of pillows and the blanket off my side of the bed and went and lay down on the floor in the baby's room with him in the crook of my arm because I couldn't sit in the rocker and hold him or I'd drop him when I dozed off. About an hour later (so - 1am?) he was finally soundly enough asleep that I could put him back in the crib and go crawl back into my own bed, and maybe four hours after that when he woke up and cried I went and sacked out on the floor with him again until Himself came in to get him and objected that he hadn't meant to chase me away. It was rough.
However, Himself realized that the regression coincided pretty neatly with the buildup of the sleep deficit from only having one nap per day at day care - kid was only 11 months old, and apparently the transition from two naps to one nap is more usually a sort of 15-month milestone. So we asked day care to put him down for two naps per day, and after only a small amount of resistance they agreed, and wouldn't you know, the kid did not object to taking two naps, and in fact he seemed to be sleeping a little better.
Meanwhile, Himself and I have begun the conversation about whether to have a second child (hypothetically, pulling the goalie next summer), and I shouldn't have been - and I guess I wasn't, really - surprised, but it was a fucking disaster. Short version: I want another kid, he really doesn't think he can, there isn't a way to achieve any kind of compromise on that sort of question, we went to talk to his therapist about it, the door isn't completely closed and locked but I really need to find a way to be prepared to accept that it's not going to happen and even when the prince is at his most impossible the idea of not doing all this again is devastating to me. The way he loves and trusts us is like a narcotic but not dangerous. How could I not want more? I can't talk about it any more right now. I feel queasy even having thought about it this much. It leaves me helplessly distraught. I hate it.
So we got home from that appointment with the therapist to where my in-laws had been babysitting, and while the four of us were waiting for dinner to be delivered we heard the prince crying and I went up to begin the process of getting him back to sleep and he was covered in puke. We got him cleaned up and changed his jammies and his linens and started some laundry and I got him back to bed before everyone else was done with dinner. He didn't have a fever, so we believed he had coughed until he vomited (the cough from his bronchiolitis a couple months ago has been lingering). The incident did not repeat itself, anyway.
Oh hang on: That night he threw up was Thursday 17th, which means the awful Friday night was the night after, not the week before.
Anyway, we put him down for two naps each of the days that weekend, and things were going a lot better, and Himself ran into the day care director at Whole Foods and answered honestly when she asked how the prince was doing - and she agreed to back him up when he insisted on two naps at drop-off the next morning. So Monday 20th the kiddo had two naps and that was a step toward improvement. I was violently ill with some sort of stomach bug, though - Himself did a whole day solo because I didn't feel safe even picking the baby up, I was so unsteady.
And then Tuesday afternoon 21st, day care called to say the prince had a 102-degree fever. Damn it all. So we went and got him, and took him to urgent care, on the way to which he threw up in the car, and at which he threw up in the exam room waiting for the doctor, so of course we kept him home Wednesday also - he slept most of the day but required one of us to be holding him, so we took turns teleworking and baby-cradling - and then Thursday, Thanksgiving, was his birthday. I no longer remember how he slept between Saturday and Wednesday nights, but he had a nap Thursday morning that was so long we never did get to a second nap that day - so Thursday night we put him to bed early, and he seems to have treated bedtime as his second nap. That is, he woke up three hours later and it was a three-hour project to get him back down again. Friday he resisted his second nap but I insisted - insisted - that he take it, and I think Friday night might have gone a little better? Saturday night he did okay but woke up at 4:30 Sunday morning, at which point I went and brought him back into the big bed with us, because I knew he'd sleep if he had snuggles but I needed more sleep myself. Same thing happened Sunday night into Monday morning.
Of course we can't let this keep going on if we don't want it to go on indefinitely, which we don't, so - and with the encouragement of the pediatrician, who reminds us that nothing is going to work the first time we try it and the only way to achieve normalcy is to make a plan, agree on it, and stick to it ruthlessly - we decided no more bringing him back to our bed and in fact no more picking him up and trying to rock him back to sleep, because what happens is he goes right to sleep in our arms and then wakes up when we put him down. Lather, rinse, repeat for an hour and a half until we give up in exhausted frustration and the kid cries for half an hour and then goes back to sleep. I don't want to get all I-told-you-so with my husband but I've been thinking for weeks that the solution to that problem is to cut straight to the end of the page and let the half-hour of crying come first and the rest of the two hours of us being awake not happen at all. Which is now what the plan is. Our being in there just makes the baby angrier every time we put him down or don't pick him up in the first place - so what I did when he woke up at 1 am last night was go in to be sure he wasn't on fire, pat him once, not pick him up, and leave the room. Of course he was mad. He cried for half an hour, went back to sleep, woke up several times over the next twenty minutes to cry for a couple of minutes at a time, and then was quiet for the rest of the night. And we weren't getting up and lying back down and rocking him and standing over the crib patting him and thinking we'd got it but hearing him cry the moment we thought the nursery door was closed behind us and we were clear - none of that. It wasn't fun knowing he was crying for an hour and I wasn't able to stop it, but it was a lot less un-fun than trying and failing, is one way of describing it.
Still, I'm exhausted. And sick - I hadn't really recovered from the stomach thing when I picked up a head-and-chest thing, so today I've been trying not to cough because although there's gummy crud in my chest and I want it out, coughing really hurts. My throat is fine; the pain is in my actual chest, which is rare for me and I don't like it. This is a lungier thing than my usual cough. I think if I were sick or tired I wouldn't be quite as unhappy as I am right now, but because I'm both, I'm having to work really hard not to resent my kid and my husband and not to give in to snappish anger and not to just drink wine and eat ice cream and think "fuck it" about everything else.
So look at that, it turns out I had a lot to say about things that aren't awesome after all. But listen: Mainly this kid is awesome, like I said. And now he is one. ♥ ♥ ♥