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
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Thursday, Feb. 26, 2004 - Mamma
Well, Jack is well and truly mobile as of a few days ago. Now he can not only move around, but he can do so quickly and fairly effortlessly.
With freedom of movement comes independence. With independence comes, unfortunately, frustration.
Last night was a "peek experience" in frustration for our poor little guy.
His current "favorite game" is to crawl from one book shelf to another, stopping long enough to pull all the books off the shelf.
It may be partly my fault. I have established the two lower shelves of our three most prominent book shelves as "Jack space". His toys and books are displayed there and while we discourage his dumping all the books (hundreds of them) on the floor, we do allow it.
Now, however, he can easily crawl from this "safe space" to my cookbook shelf near the kitchen or to the reference shelf in the foyer, and he wants to dump those books on the floor, too. But that's not allowed.
At first it was possible for me to distract him, but toward evening yesterday, Jack was not only frustrated, he was very, very tired. (He was teething and so didn't sleep well the night before.)
Eventually I scooped him up and carried him to the back of the house away from all the tantalizing book shelves...and he went straight for Dad's CPAP -- the breathing machine he uses at night to keep his breathing passages open.
Obviously the CPAP can't be allowed to Jack as a toy, and on the third time I tried to distract him, Jack burst into heartbroken tears.
Here he had all these wonderful new skills that he could use to explore all kinds of exciting new adventures...and Mamma was ruining everything. The poor little guy couldn't comprehend why I would do that. He cried and real tears spilled down his sweet little face ... and then he collapsed into my arms where he was wracked with sobs that seemed like they'd break his tiny body. I held him, and whispered soothing things as I rubbed his back, and eventually he started to calm down a little, so we went and put on his night diaper and his pajamas...and I got an "almost smile" when I let him choose his own pajamas.
It didn't take him long to nurse to sleep -- but the little guy was so exhausted that he was restless for the first several hours. Every time I moved, he came looking for me in his sleep. Eventually he did fall into a deep slumber -- which provided its own source of worry. Jack is almost completely reverse cycled. That is to say, that he gets most of his food at night and just gets a few ounces as a top up while I'm at work during the day.
I hope he did OK. He did nurse well before I left for work...
Not-quite-ten months seems so yound to have to learn to deal with strong and unpleasant emotions like anger and frustration. I know we all did ... but it's so sad. We wish we could protect them forever...and it turns out we can't really protect them at all!
UPDATE: He did fine, though he was very hungry by the time I got home from work. And we tried leaving the books on the floor rather than rushing to put them back -- and he lost interest after a half a shelf! That bodes well for the eventual safety of the books!
