Who Is This Kid?

Who stole my son and replaced him with this crabby, whiney one?

I don’t know if it’s teeth, decompressing from the holiday madness, or just being 14 months old, but this week my son has been a bit of a terror.

He doesn’t want to eat hardly anything, so he therefore throws what I offer him onto the floor. Thankfully, we have a dog who is very happy about this.

For bedtime and naptimes, he just wants to crawl off the bed and walk around the room, getting into mischief. Normally we just read books and then he nurses to sleep. Now he won’t really even nurse, just suckle for a minute or so and then push off of me to go play. If I try to insist he stay and snuggle and nurse (and hopefully fall asleep), he fights me with literally all his might and then the tantrums begin.

When he’s awake, he’s often whining or saying “no” in a whiney voice really about nothing in particular. Or, if we say no to something he wants, or take something away from him that he shouldn’t have, an all-out tantrum takes place. I’m stumped on what to do about this. He’s too young to really understand punishment, in my opinion, and if I yell, he just thinks it’s funny and starts laughing.

Of course, I started this post yesterday and today has already been going better. But, still.

My hubby is ready to move him out of our room due to the morning parties Burkley has been throwing for himself (I, of course, am always invited/required to attend.) This morning it was at 3:00am. We went in his room and played. Until 4:45. Gah. Almost two hours! For most of that, I laid on the floor attempting sleep with some pillows and blankets until he eventually came up and laid down next to me at which point I nursed him to sleep. We laid there on his floor for a couple of minutes and then I gently picked him up and brought him back to bed with us. I can see how that is annoying to my hubby when he wakes up at 5:00 to go to work.

My wonderful co-volunteers over at the Natural ParentsNetwork suggested to me that maybe Burkley is ready to make the transition to one nap rather than two.  Maybe for naps and bedtime he simply isn’t tired. I think this is a valid suggestion, even though I see the rims around his eyes turning red and his yawning, which are normally early indicators of tiredness for Burkley. I don’t like to wait until he’s hit full on exhaustion because then it gets really bad. So, today we are trying one nap. So far, he’s falling asleep pretty easily, but he did have a middle-of-the-night party, so of course he’s tired. After this nap, I’m going to try to keep him up until bedtime and see how that goes. However, I do want to note that last week he had three days of only one nap and I thought that was the reason for his moodiness. But, then it was Christmas and we spent four solid days with family, so I thought I would try to get him “back on track” with two naps. However, maybe it does make sense to make now the time to try one nap since it’s almost like starting fresh with a new routine anyway.

In other (good) news, Burkley is really loving making animal sounds. His current animal sounds include those for a cow, pig, dog, monkey, snake, lion, and bird. Here's a picture of him doing the "mooo" for a cow. So cute. :)