Skip to main content

can someone please give me my kid back?

i’m experiencing a bit of frustration lately. okay, a lot. and it’s exhausting. something happened to my sweet, wonderful, bestest little boy ever and he has been replaced with a TWO YEAR OLD! ugh. i’ve been quite spoiled in the last two years. as a baby, micah was super-content and never required more than his fair share of attention. a little later, he discovered climbing and my biggest challenge was trying to keep him from falling on his head. for the last year or so, he’s been so low maintenance, i’ve REALLY gotten spoiled. last spring, i discovered that he was great for easy bedtimes. plunk him in the crib, give him a couple books, say night night, and that was it! a few tears here and there, but more often than not, would fall asleep without much fuss. he was also really good at entertaining himself and would disappear into his bedroom to read books. he was also mostly trustworthy about putting stuff in his mouth or other ‘dangerous’ type things. i could point at a burner, say ‘hot’ and he would walk away.

well, now i can’t turn my back 5 seconds without him getting into trouble! last week we had to say good bye to the crib because he could climb out of it, so now naps are a rare luxury. he runs away everytime you want him to do anything. he gets into layla’s coloring supplies and colors on EVERYTHING. he can reach anything i can by pushing a chair over or climbing onto the counter. he’s back on the table every other minute. he tries to help himself to the fruit basket (it’s a hanging fruit basket) all the time. he’s started playing in the toilet again. i got out the door knob covers again, but he already took one off once. his favorite ‘toys’ are things he’s not supposed to have. he likes to get on a stool and examine the contents of the junk drawer. he likes to pull shane’s school things off the shelf and scatter them all over the floor. toys are of very little use to him right now. the only thing he does with toys is dump them out all over the floor and then start chucking them across the room, OR hits people with them. SO fun. and he’s not interested in any of them for longer than 5 minutes, if that! UGH! yes, i realize he wants attention, but given that i’ve got a homeschooling 4th grader in the house, and a 4 year old as well, there are times i NEED him to entertain himself!

and then there’s the scary factor. last night, while dave, shane and i were all standing in the kitchen, micah sat down in the middle of the floor, RIGHT NEXT TO US, and proceeded to pull the jug of dishwasher detergent out of the child-locked cabinet under the sink. dave looked down and noticed him as he was pulling off the dried-on dribbles and putting them in his mouth and wiping it onto his face! hello!!!! i wiped a big blob of this stuff off of his eyelashes and washed out his mouth and gave him a big cup of milk, but i have to say, i stayed up VERY late last night so i could be sure he was okay… yes, he’s fine - he couldn’t have gotten very much in, but good grief! i always wondered who those kids were that you heard about who drank bleach or gasoline… well, now i know. sheesh!

thank goodness he’s still cute.

i know layla went through this too. starting around 18 months or so, she lost all interest in toys and only wanted to play with the mail, the laundry, important documents or other things that were not for her. i don’t think we ever really solved it, mostly just did damage control, and eventually she discovered coloring and that was that.

shane NEVER went through anything like this. he would play with cars or trains or whatever for hours. HOURS! he was very self-entertaining, never got into trouble.

at any rate, life is somewhat difficult right now. i’m feeling worn out. i didn’t get a shower in until 1:15 today when micah (miraculously) took a short nap. i used to be able to do that without worrying, but not now. and since he can get out of bed on his own, i’m not really comfortable doing it before he wakes up either (on the off chance that i should be able to drag myself out of bed before him). layla is kind of emotional right now as well, and shane is his usual highly-distractable, schoolwork-hating self, which leaves me frequently with 3 kids who require my undivided attention. right.

okay, sorry this was kind of a long ramble/rant/whine. life’s really not so bad, as long as i can keep micah in one piece and maintain some semblance of my sanity, i guess we’ll be okay. wish me luck!

Comments

  1. I noticed your IM caption and thought "Man, I hope she's blogged!"
    Sorry I have no solutions or words of wisdom other than...
    "Chin up my friend" :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

all comments are moderated. unkind comments will be deleted.

you may like...

“uncle!”

i ran my dishwasher last night. i know it’s a few weeks too soon, but i have declared my lenten ‘fast’ over. no, i didn’t just give up because washing dishes by hand was too ‘hard’. rewind to 8:30ish yesterday morning. i went to get micah some cereal and discovered that there were like 4 mini wheats in the bag in the cupboard. given that i buy cereal at costco most of the time AND that i have no pantry, i usually take one of bags out to keep in the house, and the remaining bag, in the original box, is stored on a shelf in the garage. i went out to retrieve the second bag. it was empty. HUH? the empty bag, was in the box, unopened. then i discovered a hole, somewhere between the size of a tennis ball and a golf ball, in the side of the bag. HUH? then i looked down on the floor and around the shelf and discovered some small samples of telltale ‘evidence’ to backup the suspicion i didn’t want to acknowledge. <insert favorite swear word here> so i started looking ar...

blessed with good oral health!

well, i made it another 6 months with no cavities! i had a dentist appointment today. my second in six months, but prior to that, i don’t think i’d been in 4+ years. oops. i was much less nervous for this appointment than i was for the last one. last time i figured my luck had run out and because i’d been bad about seeing the dentist, this time i’d really ‘pay’ for it. but no. other than a little excessive scraping of tartar (4 years’ worth), everything was fine. around the time i turned 20, i pretty much assumed, every time i went to the dentist, that this was finally my time for a cavity. i mean, how long really, can one person go without ANY cavities? well, now i’m kind of over that and figure that maybe my teeth are just impenetrable or something. at any rate, every time the dentist comes in at the end of my cleaning, pokes around for a minute and tells me my teeth look great, i breathe a sigh of relief and feel tremendous gratitude for my good teeth. the no cavities thing is only ...

random diaper musings

do you ever feel at odds with yourself? i constantly feel like i'm a big wad of contradictions. and being the living-in-my-head, overthinking type i can spend years, i mean hours pondering things. it can really get me down. example: diapers. one would think that this was a relatively easy thing to handle. i've got 3 kids. i'm pretty familiar with diapers. it seems so simple; your baby needs a change so you take the old diaper off and put a new one on. done. right? no. i have this constant dilemma going on. cloth or disposable. i have 25 perfectly good fitted cloth diapers that i paid a lot of money for when i decided a couple years ago that i was done filling up landfills. so micah wears them a good share of the time. but it bugs me that they're so bulky, especially with the covers on and clothes fit funny and that totally drives me nuts. so at home, he just wears the diaper w/ no cover and when we leave the house, i put a disposable on him. not usually...

christmas eve

christmas eve is probably my favorite church service of the year. our sanctuary is gorgeous with the trees and the poinsettias, with ALL 4 advent candles lit AND the christ candle in the middle… it probably helps that this is the church I grew up in and I remember waiting for all that stuff as the season progressed, and how exciting it always was when it FINALLY got there. And then there is the music. growing up as the kid of the organist, who did christmas eve “right”, I have high standards. we MUST start with “oh come, all ye faithful”, and we MUST end with “joy to the world”. the church is always packed, so the organ is played at full blast, with all the extra bells and whistles. it is unbelievably awesome. deanna, our new organist, does not disappoint. the music is always wonderful. near the end (right before ‘joy to the world’), we always turn the lights down and sing “silent night” by candlelight. I don’t know what it is, but I have NEVER made it through that without tearing up. ...

fevers and coughs and irritated bladders, oh my!

yes, i know it's summer. my kids don't seem to though, because it seems that they are still managing to get sick! yesterday layla started coughing like she was going to die and tonight i discovered that shane has a fever. joy. he said he woke up with a headache this morning so i gave him some motrin and he seemed to be better and did normal, lazy, summer stuff (mainly he watched tv, took a really long time doing his chores, and picked on his sister) until wyatt got home and then he went over there and played for awhile. he came home saying he was really cold and i told him to put on a sweatshirt - it's not a particularly nice day. before dinner he said his headache was back and he was particularly unwilling to get up off the couch to come eat. when he finally did get there, he said he felt fine, other than the headache, but he was freezing and he had that kind of doped up look to his eyes so i figured i ought to take his temperature. 101.3. oops. i guess he's sick. layl...