My Son has a Death Wish

First of all, welcome to the new blog layout. I hope you like it.

Second of all,

Holy Crap My Son is Making Me Crazy!!

Tommy is an extremely wiggly baby. And when I say wiggly I mean, he is constantly going. He can't quite crawl yet (though I predict he will by the end of the week- no joke!) but he just goes, and goes, and goes. 

They call it "Hyperactive" or "High Need." Anyone else have a hyperactive baby? This website has some good information about it- finally I feel like there must be other people out there dealing with this, and I'm not totally alone. 

Some parts that describe us fairly well: 

The cry of a high need baby is not a mere request, it's an urgent demand. These babies put more energy into everything they do. They cry loudly, feed voraciously, laugh with gusto, and protest more forcefully if their needs are not met to their satisfaction. Because they feel so deeply, they react more powerfully if their feelings are disturbed. "If I don't feed him as soon as he fusses, he falls apart" is a common statement from the mother of such a baby. 

Tommy doesn't cry the way you normally think of a baby crying. When he wants something, he literally yells at us. In this obnoxious-but-sometimes-adorable-and-hilarious little baby language until we meet the need. It often makes us laugh. But if we don't do it quickly enough and he does cry? Read on.

After a while, I found myself going into over-drive instantly whenever she cried, because I knew if it got out of control she'd quickly disintegrate and it would take her a long time to come back around. I became obsessive in trying to prevent her from getting upset in any way because there was hell to pay if she did.

This is us, 100%. When Tommy wakes up only 20 minutes into his nap, we try to get to him with a pacifier before he wakes up enough to cry. Otherwise that nap was completely worthless, because we'll spend the next hour trying to calm him/get him to sleep. And then the rest of the day is messed up, and I am not a happy mommy.

About 3 months. "Yelling."

Also, cry-it-out does not work for Tommy. I've tried it. No matter how long you let him "cry it out," he will not. settle. down. Period. My mom even flew out here a few weeks ago to grant me some sanity and sleep by dealing with Tommy during the night, and one day while Nate and I were out, she tried CIO. When we got home, even she agreed that it doesn't work with him. And she's the Baby Whisperer.

"Why do high need babies need more of everything but sleep?" groaned a tired mother. You would think that high need babies would need more sleep; certainly their tired parents do.

This might be our biggest problem. I don't know what the deal is, but hyperactive babies, as tired as you would expect them to be, SUCK at sleeping. Tommy literally CANNOT make himself relax. No matter how tired he gets. And once he does fall asleep, he wakes up. During the day its after very short periods- 30 or 40 minutes, sometimes resulting in a total daily naptime of about 2-3 hours. At this age he "should be" getting about 4. I wish. And during the night, he wakes up over and over because he moves all over the place. Hyperactive babies are restless. I have to go in multiple times a night to give him his pacifier so he'll go back to sleep. Therefore I may be in bed for 7 hours, but with all the interruptions its sometimes like being awake all night.

And this: HI Mom!! I only slept for 5 minutes but I feel SO Refreshed!

Swaddling doesn't help, because he can get out of all of them. Even the velcro ones, even the uber-velcro ones. We have to do a blanket swaddle to get him to sleep, because if his hands are out he rubs his face over and over, takes out his pacifier, and just keeps himself awake. Then he gets his arms out in his sleep and proceeds to roll around. And I've tried many times to get him to sleep unswaddled, and it probably only worked twice. When he was ridiculously exhausted. And I'm pretty sure I was too. AND he didn't stay asleep for long.

Isn't this thing supposed to keep me restrained?

SO.
(Still reading?)
When Tommy was younger, we could rock him almost to sleep, and put him in his crib while he was still slightly awake, and he would go to sleep the rest of the way on his own. It was great. Sometimes it took a long time to get to that point, but things were relatively good. Tommy was learning to go to bed without needing us to get him all the way out.

Then about 4 weeks ago, Tommy started flipping out if we tried to put him down while he was still slightly awake (another High Needs Baby tendency: separation sensitivity). He would burst into tears and we would have to start all over with a baby that was practically inconsolable. His crying felt like he was having his heart broken- Mommy is leaving me all alone in this bed and I'm never going to see her again ever! I felt like I was breaking his trust. I quickly gave up this ridiculous game because I couldn't take it anymore, and went ahead and rocked him all the way to sleep. In a rocking chair, in my lap, in a blanket-swaddle, with soothing music playing on my phone. And there I sit, replacing his pacifier over and over while he cries, until he finally falls asleep, and then after about ten minutes (for fear of him not being asleep enough and freaking out all over again) I go put him in his crib.

The only way he will fall asleep. After much fussing.

And this, friends, is where I am still stuck. Thank goodness my parents got me an iPhone, so I can at least entertain myself for the crazy amount of time I spend in that chair (and thank goodness its a cushy couch rocker thing and not hard wood!).

But this too, is starting to fall apart. It's starting not to work. Naptime and bedtime are getting harder again, and I'm running out of ideas. The last two nights in a row, we haven't been able to get him to sleep till about 10:30! He used to be asleep by 8 or 8:30, which was so nice, but now he pretty much just fights us that whole time. (Even leaving him alone doesn't work- like I said, he can't self-soothe). The worst part is that its obvious that he's super tired, but for whatever reason he can't/wont sleep.

And SOME days (I'm almost done, I promise), I feel nothing but compassion for him. Oh, poor baby, what's wrong? Why wont you sleep?

Other days I have to leave the room and close the door so I wont hurt him! Sounds awful, doesn't it? You're probably not a mom.

And those days (yesterday) are the ones that I have a complete meltdown. I've yelled at him before- told him to shut up and go to sleep already! (He's only 5 months old!) And then I just completely fall apart and sob, because I know he's an innocent little baby and he can't help it. And I feel like an awful mother, and wonder how God could have entrusted me with such a sweet little baby when I have so many, many flaws.

I love my son. He is the biggest blessing in my life. But some days he is also the biggest frustration, and  sometimes I don't know how to handle it.

On a lighter note! We took Tommy swimming for the first time today, and although he wasn't too thrilled at first, he quickly cheered up and giggled whenever I popped out from underwater and surprised him. I'll post pics of that tomorrow.

I love this little stinker. With all of my heart. Even though some days I'm not sure he's going to see his first birthday, I would never go back to life without him. All of the frustration is worth it, even though sometimes that's hard to remember.

Changes

Thought I should post something now, cause once school starts I don't know if I'll have much time.

Nothing too thrilling is going on for Nate and me right now, but that's a-ok. There are some major changes going on for our families, however.

Nate's family now lives in Costa Rica. Apparently they have an awesome little house with a pool and a separate guest house (for us when we visit!) and it's great. Everything out there is of course in Spanish, so his sisters are going to be pros. I'm jealous of everything.

My parents just got to Virginia yesterday. They are going to live in Nate's parents' house while they're in Costa Rica for the next 5 years. The plan is that in exchange for not paying rent, my parents are going to fix up the house and make it super cute, cause it needs a little help.

In the meantime, Nate and I feel a little... in limbo. If we go back to Escondido to visit, I wont have my own house! We'd have to stay with my grandma, or in the Cloyd's motorhome (which is fine, just different). There might even already be someone else living in my house. That's so weird! And if we go to VA, we'd get to stay at Nate's house, but it would be all changed and his family wouldn't be there, and it would really kinda be MY parents' house instead. Weird.

But we're happy for our families and think all these changes are for the better. Hopefully once I graduate in April, Nate can do an internship in Costa Rica so we can be with his family and practice our Español. Then, after Nate graduates we can leave P-town and go live (for free!) at Nate's house in VA with my parents, while going to Grad school at George Mason. I am SO ready to be done with school and move away, even though I'll be sad to leave our awesome friends. But being in the DC area, there's no shortage of museums for me to possibly work at.

And I'm SO ready for school to start because it means I'm that much closer to being done! Thank goodness.

So, that's pretty much it... oh, and Sara is back out here, so it's been fun hanging out with her. Spencer wont be here for another few days, and Nate is really restless waiting for him. He hasn't seen him in over two years! He's really excited and I'm glad he gets to have his "widdle brudder" back.

Cops & Robbers

A few weeks ago I called my parents to talk about planning a trip out to visit them at home in San Diego this summer. Before we got much of that decided though, mom proceeded to tell me about a little "incident" that had occurred a few days before.

When my mom came home from work, entering through the laundry room as usual, she failed to notice a chair beneath the bathroom window right next to the door. My mom is an avid
gardener, and the chair was conveniently concealed behind some of her many beautiful plants. Mom went into the kitchen, closing the laundry room door behind her, but instead of continuing down the hall to her bedroom like she normally does, she went into the backyard and puttered around her garden with our German shepherd, Sunny.



All of the sudden, Sunny started going crazy, running all around the outside of the house, down to the street, back by the laundry room, and finally stopping in between my mom and the house, refusing to move. My mom began to wonder what was going on, so she headed back to the house with Sunny in tow. As she walked around the kitchen and ventured into the other rooms, she began to see small things that were out of their usual place. Either she hadn't noticed earlier, or somehow she subconsciously ignored these changes. When she saw that the laundry room door, which she had closed, was now open, she was sure that someone had just been in the house.

He was probably down the hall near her bedroom when she came inside. For some reason, she changed from her normal routine and didn't go down there. Intuition? I think maybe it was a little something more than that.

Anyway, my mom looked around and discovered several small but expensive items missing, including her original engagement ring, some of my dad's coin collection, and a little stash of cash that my dad had been saving to buy himself a fancy mountain bike. Lots of things were left untouched though, including my dad's two laptops, his cameras, the gun case, and lots of the jewelry and coins. I wonder how much would have been gone if he hadn't been interrupted.

The thief had put a chair up to the laundry-bathroom window, which had been left open. That window is tiny! At about 2 feet wide by 1 foot tall, the guy couldn't have been very big himself. Anyway, the police found tons of good fingerprints, and hopefully they find him. How much can you do to a thief though? Fine him and send him on his way?

I hope this serves as a reminder that even though "it never happens to you," it really can. Be careful and make sure not to get too comfortable with leaving windows and doors open or unlocked. That guy is just lucky that Sunny wasn't in the house...