We're very lucky.
Jack is the sort of child
we all assume we'll have
when we decide to have children,
and the sort of child
less experienced parents
congratulate themselves for.January and February 2004
March and April 2004
May and June 2004
July and August 2004
September and October 2004
November and December 2004
Blogs we read:
Monday, Oct. 25, 2004 - (Mamma)
Night Terror
Oh joy of joys! Oh the many wonders of parenthood! Jack has started to have what appears to be night terrors!
I don't remember TJ and Corey having them, but I have to admit, the memories wouldn't have been my fondest, nor would they have been so dreadful that I'm sure I'd remember.
On Saturday night, shortly after I had fallen asleep, Jack "woke up" crying very suddenly. Except that, though his eye were open, he didn't actually seem to be awake.
Rod was still up, and after a few minutes of me holding Jack and trying, in my sleepy, ineffectual way, to be soothing, he came in to see if he could help. Evidently, Rod recognized the phenomenon, though whether because he had experienced it before or because he still had some synapses firing, I didn't think to ask.
He asked me to hand Jack to him. He carried him gently out into the well-lit kitchen and they came back a few minutes later with Jack sucking happily on a sippy cup and looking a little confused, but not at all unhappy.
He handed Jack back to me, and we snuggled back down and Jack and I were both asleep within seconds.
It happened again Sunday night, only this time Rod was asleep, too. So I staggered out of bed with the sleeping, but crying, baby. I stumbled into the bathroom and blinded us both with the bathroom lights. Jack stopped crying and looked confused, and then he whimpered.
Taking this as a good sign, I turned off the lights and back to bed we went. We were both asleep within moments.
Now, the interuptin is brief, but this could get to be a problem. So I researched it on the Internet. Of course.
What I learned is that between 5% and 20% of children have night terrors and that boys are a lot more susceptible to them than girls. One thing that sets them off, is going to bed already overtired, and they tend in most cases to be intermittent -- they are rarely a nigtly event. All good to know. So, I guess the thing to do is to see if we can't get him to bed earlier. I must admit that he has seemed extremely tired by bedtime lately...but we hadn't had much luck getting him to bed earlier. It seems like it's time to try harder.
Language redux...again
I mentioned very recently that Jacks eemed to have stopped using words much and seemed to be mainly asking "What's this" constantly.
No sooner did I say that, then he started using more words than ever, and far more clearly than he was before. Now, total strangers understand him easily -- as evidenced by the fact that several times yesterday, I was corrected when I asked Jack if he meant one word when he said another.
As an example, "hot" has long meant 'out', 'hot', 'hurts', and 'wet'. So, when Jack said "hot" to me while we were wandering the isles of the festival Rod worked yesterday, I asked him if his diaper was wet. A man whose booth we were passing said "No, he said he's hot." It was funny the first time, and even funnier when it continued to happen all afternoon.
I was very impressed with Jack's behavior at the festival -- there were lots and lots of sparkly things and lots of interesting peopl, and while he did wander quite a bit, once he was told that he could look, but he mustn't touch ... he did! What a guy!
