“Baby” – the 9mo variety… What an active time of exploration!!! My nephew is already trying to climb out of his play pen area and he can’t even stand up without holding onto something yet!!! Then he’s getting his one-year molars on top of it, so he’s voraciously chewing on everything in sight (including me – he bit my knuckle with those front piranha teeth of his and it hurt! I guess he got a knuckle sandwich, so to speak, haha!). But then there are those inconsolable times. Those are the times when he’s not happy with anything except me holding him, and sometimes not even that. Our problem-solving if-then chart has expanded or changed somehow, and I can’t figure it out! Something’s missing! I want to say to him sometimes, “Baby, I don’t know what to do!” If I knew what was wrong, I’d do my best to fix it for him, but sometimes I think that I’m just not the one who can fix it – that he wants Mom or Dad and I’m not either one of them!!! Sorry, Squiggle Bug, but I’m just Aunt Chris. I can’t be anybody else! I can’t be who you need me to be right now, I guess… It breaks my heart to see him cry inconsolably for long periods of time, and I know that there’s nothing we can do about it because we’ve already made sure he’s fed, he’d had his bottle, he’s had a diaper change, he’s got things to snuggle with, he’s got things to chew on, he’s got things to play with, he’s been (or is being) held… As far as over-tiredness goes, we can’t make him sleep, but we try to make his environment such that he could bed down and crash anywhere he wanted to comfortably and we’d make sure he was safe. I think that sometimes it’s just a matter of Jerrold and me not being Mom and/or Dad. Not much we can do about that. We feel a helpless frustration with our inability to comfort him. A good sign, though, is that he’s already trying to climb and he can’t even stand up unassisted yet. He’s definitely a climber!!! Oh, the fun we’ll have! If I don’t die in the process of trying to figure out what’s wrong during these times of tragedy that he seems to have, that is!!!
Content Rating PG, for the most part
I try to keep the content of my posts in the PG range (meaning that maybe your 13-year-old should not read it... Just kidding!) - you know, something I could get away with tastefully in the town square without getting lynched, tarred-and-feathered, or hung (and something my mother would NOT wash my mouth out with soap for). As far as what age you have to be to understand some of the subtleties of my humor in writing and/or speaking, well... That may vary. A lot.
CLIMBING 4 THE REST OF US 