In the dark of night all of a sudden there was loud shrieking. Not the typical, "wah, wah" of a regular baby cry, but a definite voice-cracking, terrified scream. I ran in to check on him. He was sitting up, wide awake, whimpering. He saw me and put his hands up, begging for me to pick him up. I rocked him, but he was clearly not going to just fall back to sleep.
Unfortunately, Billy is prone to night terrors. It's been a long time since he's had one. But since he was just a tiny lil guy, he has often woken up in the middle of the night screaming- about since the time that we stopped swaddling him. He often talks in his sleep saying "Mama" or "Dada", so I suspect in his terrors he is alone. When he wakes up he neds company for a long while.
So, I brought him into the bed with us. I even gave him is own pillow (a very flat one.) He was content for about five minutes until he started giggling and clapping. Then he started slapping Daddy on the back. Ok, time to go back to the crib. He went right back to sleep in his crib.
We started our morning examining his art hanging on the wall in the kitchen. He was so excited to see the pciture he drew (I loosely use that term) yesterday, that I decided to give him crayons first thing this morning. I had to break open a new box sine he broke all of the crayons I gave him yesterday. He was excited to see new colors in the box and colored furiously. He kept going back to see his art hanging up. He's so excited that I hung it up. But I had to take the crayons away after he wanted to carry the crayons all over the house and presumably try them on things other than paper.
I decided to take him up to Sam's Club to get more fruits and Chobani. I needed food for his lunch and dinner, so I figured, since he seemed ok, that we would go get him some treats. We came home and he had Chobani for lunch. He even picked out which flavor he wanted out of the fridge and handed the container to me.
The day deteriorated from there.
He refused to take a nap. I tried everything. More stuffed animals in the crib. More milk. More rocking. Nope. I finally gave up and got him up to play. But, because he was so tired, he was miserable. We tried all kinds of toys. I set up his tent fort. We threw toys for Buddy. He would be happy for a few minutes, but every little thing would set him off. It doesn't help that Buddy has a cone on his head and keeps running in to Billy, knocking him over and setting him to wailing.
Finally! Finally, he was so tired that I was able to get him to go to sleep. It was a fitful sleep and didn;t last long, but it made a world of difference in his mood. Grandma had suggested I drive him around, but he wakes up as soon as I get him out of the car and then refuses to go back to sleep. And of course, if I'm driving around for naptime just to have him sleep, then i lose those crucial minutes of time when I can get things done. This time is important to me- he wants to help me with whatever I'm doing, and if I'm doing something that would be dangerous for him (like cleaning the toilet with chemicals), then I don't want him around for that.
It's not that I don't want him around. I tried once to clean the den with Green Works. I'm constantly cleaning the coffee table. So, I decided to try to clean it with him around. Buddy did something that required being yelled at. In the two seconds it took to yell at Buddy "Hey, stop that!" I turned to find Billy putting his mouth over the back of the spray bottle. 1.) thank God it was the back and 2.) it was like Billy was lying in wait for me to turn my head for literally 2 seconds to try to kill himself. He wasn't even near the bottle at the time I started yelling at Buddy. So, now I don't do things like that when he is around.
Here is how I knew he was ready to take his nap:
Billy, don't squeeze the Charmin!
After naptime Billy was a happy baby again. We learned all about cameras and cell phones, took a turn around the court on the Green Piece of Awesome, chased down some big sticks, played with airplanes and just had a good ole time. I let him play with clay and took his handprints in the clay.
So, I'll leave you today with a picture of Billy learning about size.
Billy went and got Daddy's shoes and asked me to put them on him. He quickly learned that walking in Daddy's shoes is much harder than he thought, no matter how much he tried.
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