This is what Xander says sometimes when you ask him how old he is. He holds up all five fingers, and then rubs his head when he says “five.” It’s one of my many favorite things about him.
With turning two, he’s (appropriately) cutting his two year molars. And teething still, and will always, sucks. It messes with his eating and his stomach and mostly his sleeping. He turned out to be a pretty decent sleeper, for the most part. I don’t remember WHEN it happened, only that it did. (It does get better, parents of newborns. I promise.) We had our routine: bath, stories, songs, bed. He’d be awake when we left his room, playing with his blankie, and eventually the cooing would stop and he’d sleep until morning.
Not so much with the teething. (And naps are hit and miss on the best of days.)
With teething, he starts getting whiney with the songs, and by the time we lay him down in the crib he’s screaming. One night after hours of in and out and in and out, JS broke down and brought his pillow in Xander’s room and slept on the floor.
BIG MISTAKE.
Xander loved having a roomie, and now when we go in to check on him amid the screams, he sits up, smiles, points to the floor and says, “Daddy sleep.”
Oops.
So now we’re in the oh-so-fun process of…I don’t even want to say it, lest “they” are sharpening their pitchforks, so I’ll just tell you that it rhymes with SCHERBER and SCHMEEP SCHMAINING. For the most part, Xander is not a good cry it outer. In the words of Moxie, he’s a tension increaser, so the more he cries, the more worked up he gets, and the less likely he is to fall asleep. But at this point, he’s just trying to play us so it’s time to put a kibosh on that. (And when I say that “we” are doing this, I mean that I hide out in the basement and try to ignore the crying while JS deals with it.) We do not lock him in his dark room, close the door, and say “see you in the morning.” We comfort him, just not instantly. Last night he was asleep by the second three minute interval. So. Yeah. WHATEVER WORKS.
Just put this in the column of things I said I’d never do as a parent, along with bribing him with cookies to not throw a fit in the store.
I somehow live with myself. And he wakes up just as happy and Xander-ous as ever, so I think he’ll be OK.
Other than that we’re still in the first trimester holding pattern. Tired and burpy and gaggy and tired and kinda pudgy, really. I’ve managed to tie a lot of the queasiness to low blood sugar. So if I can stay on top eating frequently enough, especially eating protein frequently enough, and avoiding too much sugar and empty carbs, I’m much better. The obvious problems being 1), a certain three foot someone with a penchant for taking of his pants makes it very hard to remember to eat and 2), ewww, protein snacks. The trade off, though, is crashing blood sugar that won’t regulate the rest of the day, so I’m sucking it up and carrying Luna Bars and little bags of mixed nuts with me everywhere I go.
If this keeps up I’m going to end up with the opposite problem of not gaining enough weight like last time (at least at first, until the trimester of chocolate cake came).
Hopefully we can repeat that trimester. It was fun.
