Home from the hospital. YAHOO! Only….this little boy doesn’t want me to put him down. Ever.
He doesn’t want to be held by Daddy. He doesn’t want to be held by Oma. He lets Alannah hold him, but for no more than a minute.
After a month of this, I start to feel frazzled. Too. Much. Contact.
Digestive problems kick in. How can this be? He’s nursing, and I’m avoiding all the “allergy trigger” foods. Call the LC at the hospital – it’s overactive letdown resulting in a foremilk/hindmilk imbalance. Solution? Nurse on one side only for a minimum of 8 hours instead of switching several times within each feeding. He was still cranky, but at least he wasn’t rooting and acting like he was starving. He also looked at the world with this shocked/scared expression on his face.
At the time I was a member of the AmityMama message boards, and asked for recommendations. One of them was The Fussy Baby Book by Dr. Sears. I read it cover to cover, nodding my head and feeling relieved. There was nothing SERIOUS wrong with my son, he just needed more attention than most babies. I bought a sling. He LOVED it. He hated it. I did some research on the web, and made one in a different style. YAY! We’re HAPPY again!
Much of his infancy was spent on that roller coaster. I started counting good hours instead of good days. As he got older, things started to get familiar to him. He lost that stressed/worried look on his face. I could finally put him down in the carseat chair with Alannah to watch him long enough for me to shower.
I worried that he wasn’t walking by his first birthday. He was a rapid crawler, so I knew he had the ability. One day, he stood up and took two steps and stumbled. He crawled for the next six months. I talked to Oma about it – she told me that Tig had done basically the same thing. I stopped worrying about it quite so much then.
One day, he stood up and walked from the front door to the laundry room where I was without stumbling. It was a total of 20 feet. I cheered, we danced.
ALL of his major accomplishments have been that way. Try it once, if he can’t do it PERFECTLY the first time, back to the drawing board for another few months.
He despised using the potty chair. He would pee in a bucket, on a towel, on the grass/rocks….but NOT in the potty. One day he walked up to the toilet and realized he could pee in it. He hasn’t had an accident since. For the first month, I left the bucket/towel combo out just in case he needed it. He didn’t.
Part III – And what about the adults in this pint-sized soap opera?