Tuesday, July 21, 2015

my wrecking ball

 Baby walker. Emotional.

It's been a long week. The Brit has been in South Africa for a project, and got in this morning. As he rounded the corner, Sebastian saw him and started to hyperventilate with excitement.

So. Flipping. Cute.

As most things go, whenever the Brit goes away for work, Sebastian gets sick.

Usually this means I need to leave work early to collect him from nursery (check - viral rash all over his body, and soaring temperatures), or a bunch of teeth erupt like Vesuvius in his mouth and nothing I do will make him happy (check - he "sprouted" what looks like six molars in his mouth, in just two days. Is this even normal?)

Of course, when I went to the US, not a tooth or fever blemished the week in which Daddy was being house husband. Only when Dad goes. It's like he knows.

 Practising his walking/standing. Generally showing off.

So it's been a harrowing week. Basically, when you're up and down all night with a screaming child, who refuses to take Calpol (I mean, what?), and you're so sleep deprived that your senses become completely dulled (Walking in the rain, not realising you're walking in the rain. "Why are our clothes wet?" Yes, this happened), you basically kind of give in.

You give in to it all. You know now, that somehow, this isn't going to last forever. Even if it feels like every hour that ticks by with a grumpy, unhappy, unsleeping child, feels like a week stretching beyond you, you just give in to everything.
 Rearrange my cupboard? No problem. Just put it all back. Incidentally, he tries to - which is quite sweet. I found things stuffed into the wrong places, but the idea is there....long may it last.

As long as you don't have to have an actual conversation with anyone, usually you can just about get by. (Fine on weekends; work not so much.)

We clung to each other like primates during the roughest days. Sebastian gets clingy when he is sick and teething, and I was getting Stockholm Syndrome, (when things are so shit and so deluded you miss them when they stop), so every hour or so we would cling to each other as he was gurning his teeth off. I needed cuddles just as much as he did.
We survived!

I'd live for cake and coffee. As he arose every morning at 4:30am, angry and ready to fight, (then, immediately playful and pouncing everywhere), I thanked the universe for giving us a weekend of solid sunshine, and bundled him into his buggy and took him to the park. Both parks. All parks. So that I could drink two flat whites and eat a massive piece of cake, and he could run around and get out of the house.
 Must eat cake with coffee. Standard.

I met up with a mummy friend and basically spent the weekend chasing after my little wrecking ball as he leapt, crawled, (now starting to walk) in every direction.
Standard.

He is a handful. But even through the shittiest of weeks, I just love him more and more. He is obssessed with dogs now and points, and gets excited when he sees one and says, "Gaw!"
(A 'gaw' is a dog, but it's also a book, a wall, a shoe, any kind of object.)

He is so loving and tactile, and in equal measures so active it's fairly frightening. He climbs up over the couch like a little baboon, and now onto chairs, where he can now reach a place I never thought he would - the mantelpiece. Where the last surviving bastion of my adult life lies; things like trinkets and ornaments, all orderly and unbroken. There is a threat to their existence now too.

He uses my body as an obstacle course, and will throw himself over me and climb on me if I am sitting anywhere near him.
Definitely up [about to climb up onto] to something.
He is 100% boy. And one with some serious gnashers now. That he bites me with. Not out of malice, but more affectionate little nips.

I wonder how Daddy is going to deal with this level of teething torture now that he is home?



1 comment:

Bug Eyed said...

Sounds like a need for biltong :)