Kitty!

Yesterday morning around 6 I woke from a dead sleep to the sound of Bubba, three inches from my head, shrieking “kitty!”

He’s in a toddler bed that Baby Mama cut the legs off, with a guard rail that’s worked perfectly for containment since he was 4 months old. But now he’s out, the stinker.

When I put him to bed last night he rolled onto his belly as usual, offered his doll a pacifier, and curled up with blankie. A half hour later we’re sitting on our bed watching Grey’s Anatomy, and his door opens and he emerges carrying a train, calling “Mommy, train!” Very excited. We spent the next half hour getting back up and silently putting him in bed, over and over. It wasn’t too bad, and he wasn’t upset – he was just too excited to stay in bed when he figured out that he could get out on his own.

But now what? Tips? Ideas? Do we take the guard rail down altogether, or do we leave it up in hopes that it will at least keep him in bed if he wakes up in the middle of the night? And how can we teach him to entertain himself in his room instead of standing at the gate calling for us?

Cranky

Bubba has been pretty cranky for a while about day care. We’ve assumed it’s been about adjusting to the obvious issues around having a day care in your own house, with the biggest issue being the sharing of his Mama. Since we had this reading done a week or so ago we’ve been talking about it a lot and thinking about it a little differently.

(As an aside – I still don’t know if I believe this woman – or anyone – is actually psychic, but we both like her a lot and trust her immensely as a person, so we figured that whether she’s pyschic or just perceptive, if she struck a nerve like this we should probably listen. So that’s my I’m-not-off-my-nut caveat.)

It’s so hard to know at this age when a bad mood or bad behavior – like biting – is about adjusting, a developmental stage not necessarily related to the external stuff, or just personality. Every couple of months he’s a new person, so if he has a bad week or so we do what we can to make it better for him and hold out for growth and change.

Baby Mama has been trying to hold him a lot more during day care, which is helping. He’s still resisting the sling and the ergo except outside of the house, so it’s hard, but he does respond well. We also just arranged a kid-swap one day a week with a friend who sends her child to our day care one day a week – we’ll send him there and stop billing her. He’s completely enamored with this little girl (and we’re completely enamored of her parents and decided our kids should get married so they can be our machatunem), so maybe it will feel special to him to have a day a week when they get to hang out all day.

We’ve also tossed around the idea of sending him to a local daycare one day a week, which would probably (given the neighborhood where we live) have the advantage of being largely black and Latino kids and probably bilingual English/Spanish. But sending my little tiny guy off to be cared for by people we don’t know just strikes fear into my heart – is this what it feels like for people to enroll their kid in daycare if they don’t have their own?

Friends who are parenting adolescents tell me they would trade the emotional work for the physical work of diaper changes and bedtime routines in a minute, but I find the emotional work now to be a huge learning curve. We’re relying on a pyschic to tell us what’s going on with our kid. I wish he could talk – the current spoken and signed vocabulary of animals, methods of transportation, and foods doesn’t smooth the process much.

/Ramble

Jaws

 I am the mother of The Kid Who Bites.

When I was about 3, I remember looking at the window, seeing another little girl on the sidewalk, and informing my mother: “There’s Nicole.” She asked me which Nicole, since there were two in the neighborhood, and I told her: “the one that bites.” That was 1978 or 79, and I still remember that Nicole was The Biter. Now my child is The Biter.

Crap.

When he’s sick, he gets angry. He’s been sick since, um, October. First winter in daycare. Fucking brutal. He made it a year and a half without an ear infection, then we called the doctor about pink eye, they insisted we come in (despite our cursing the new pediatrician who was going to make us schlep him to the doc for stupid pink eye), and then diagnosed him with a double ear infection. First time on antibiotics too, which made us v. sad. The homeopath predicted that the antibiotics wouldn’t work, and would probably make him angrier. Right and right.

And it turns out he’s allergic to amoxicillin. It’s a regular carnival around here.

Last Thursday Baby Mama stopped counting how many times he bit when he got to 20. I raced home from work unsure of which of them would be dead on the floor when I got there. We called the homeopath in a panic, begging for help. He told us what to give him and we fell over ourselves trying to stuff it in his mouth.

Friday we were down to 10 bites. Saturday and Sunday, no day care, huge effort on the part of both moms to make sure Bubba had a really fun weekend and got lots of attention. No biting. Monday 3 bites. Tuesday 2 bites. And so on. This is serious improvement, and it definitely seems to run parallel to how he’s feeling. Apparently the solution is: Don’t Let Him Get Sick.

Argh.