January 15, 2012 ~ Grandma Got Run Over By Billy

If you read the post for Saturday you'll see that Daddy and I went to the game today. It was a big deal. Baltimore is a football town and it's rare that a play-off game is at home. It was a special day and the first real date Daddy and I have been on since Billy was born. We've been to dinner a few times and a few big events (weddings and such) but this was planned by us for us.

Grandma agreed weeks ago to watch Billy during play-offs. There was no way we weren't going.

I went to Grandma's last night to grab some winter clothes and prep her for a full day with Billy under foot. It's a monumental task to take on a toddler for a full day if you're not used to watching kids. Billy is especially active for a toddler, according to his daycare ladies. He runs circles around everyone.

When Grandma got here this morning I walked her through meals, gates, activities. It's a lot. Fortunately for Grandma, Billy has been extra tired and is prone to taking 3-4 hour naps when he is. I figured she'd get to watch most of the game before he woke up and then she would be able to half watch the rest of the game while she chased him around.

In a perfect world, we would have left at 11 while she was feeding him Second Breakfast. Then he would have played for an hour to an hour and then had lunch. Shortly after lunch he would have gone done for a 3-4 hour nap, so somewhere around 1-4pm. Perfect for a 1pm kick-off time. Then he would have gotten up and had a snack, followed by a bath. Then we would get home and it would have been a fabulous day for us and a fairly easy day for Grandma. We don't live in a perfect world.

We managed to get out of the house shortly after 11, but I didn't have Billy in his high chair eating Second Breakfast on the way out. He apparently refused to eat for her. She put him down for his nap but he only slept for 45 minutes. Then she tried to feed him again but he apparently wasn't hungry. Somehow, however, he managed to get Grandma to give him cheese and crackers- his favorite snack. He had no problems eating that. Grandma also went to feed him lunch, but she was so frazzled chasing him from one end of the house to the other that she couldn't find it in the fridge. It turned out she got confused with me telling her where his lunch was and me telling her where HER lunch was in the fridge. Lucky for Grandma, Great Aunt Sheila stopped over to help. Between the two of them they were so frazzled with a toddler running circles around them that they couldn't figure out how to get the gate installed, or how to turn off my ipod, which Billy had navigated off of the main screen. He snuck more snacks from Sheila and managed to steal her coke and try some- a feat never accomplished before. He's not allowed anything with caffeine, since the drug is dangerous for little ones and soda is very unhealthy for kids under a certain age. But he ran them ragged. They were very happy when we got home.

After Grandma left I figured out what was going on. I had gotten him dressed in a super cute sweater that I thought Sheila would like. It has a puppy on it. Now, I cooked the den up nice and warm for Grandma because she is always cold, and it was very cold here today. He was too hot. Therefore, because he was overheated, he didn't want to eat. Grandma said he was super thirsty all day long. He wasn't feeling good because he was hot, so he was drinking to hydrate. Also, because he was too hot, he couldn't sleep. I stripped the sweater off of him and he woofed down 2.5 times his normal dinner portion and ran around like a very happy toddler. He went to sleep, no problem.

I can't blame Grandma. These are the things that a mother might notice, but if you're not with the kid every day you don't see where the trouble is. And if you are cold yourself you probably wouldn't think that a little guy could be super warm. But my little man twice walked outside barefoot today and had to be dragged back in the house. It was so cold that the ice in my soda at the game never melted, so that my coke I bought at 12 was chilly and not watered down 4 hours later. Yeah, that cold.

But, no worries. After a few minutes he was back to his old antics. He was spinning in circles, pushing his cars around and singing. He even learned how to moonwalk! Yes, he moonwalked several times and was so impressed with himself. He also discovered that a napping Daddy is an awesome play toy. Daddy should never nap in Billy's reach. He might get attack hugged a few (ten) times.

Look, Ma! I put two binkies in Daddy's glass!

January 4, 2012 ~ To Bink Or Not To Bink?

When I was pregnant I was pretty much dead set against giving my baby a binky. I could hear my grandmother's voice in my head saying, "now don't go putting a pacifier in that child's mouth!" Unfortunately, those were her parting words to me and I cannot uphold her belief in anti-binkyism.

Despite my reservations on the bink, I insisted on buying one to have on hand, you know, just in case. I figured I would return it after the baby was a few weeks old and clearly happy with nipples and thumbs. I planned to toe the line of anti-binkyism.

But then again, there is the case of my dear friend. I went to see her when her baby was 4 days old. By that time her nips were so sore that she dreaded having to feed her sweet little girl. The little thing was just soothing herself and not eating, so she was constantly crying for the boob. Someone had given my friend a binky at her shower and I made her give that child a bink. It solved the problem and mother and baby were both happy.

Enter my own baby. He made it just fine in the hospital without the binky. After one day at home we could not stop his crying. We tried everything. In the middle of the night Daddy got fed up and stuck a binky in Billy's mouth. Problem solved. Well, symptom solved. It turned out I wasn't producing milk, so he was starving. So, by the third day home he was getting a binky and formula- two things I swore I wouldn't give him. C'est la vie.

Now, at 15 months Billy is throwing his binky in tantrums. The truth is that he doesn't need it anymore, except maybe to sleep. Despite the 12 or so binkies floating around our house we hide most of them from him and he spends the majority of each day without them. But...and this is a big but...when he is without his binky I often catch him sticking his thumb in his mouth. The binkies he has are designed to prevent needing dental work from sucking. Thumbs=braces later on.

So the question remains: going forward do we bink or don't we?