One Advances, One Retreats
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Tuesday, August 17, 2010 11:11 PM
Blaise will be 19 months old on Thursday, but when he was just 18 months, I was worried a mental breakdown might keep me from making it to this point.
Has anyone else gone through this? Dealing with an 18-month-old who makes you think you’ll lose your mind?
I don’t remember this with my daughter, but when Blaise hit 18 months it was like someone flipped a switch. A BAD switch. His already not-stellar sleeping habits turned horrendous. He clung to me constantly and screamed or yelled when things didn’t go his way.
I longed for each evening, when my husband would get home from work and I’d have another adult with whom to share the burden of Grumpy Baby.
It was just a stage, I knew, but I was apprehensive because my husband has three business trips between August 8th and September 19th. Nineteen total nights of solo parenting for me, and solo parenting is hard enough when you’re not dealing with a Grumpy Baby.
Worrying about the wrong thing always makes me feel silly. As it did, this time, when Blaise suddenly became his chipper self again the week before Bryan left on trip #1.
My baby is back to his cheerful, independent, doesn’t-drive-Mama-insane self. He’s even [mostly] sleeping through [most of] the night, a huge improvement in that department.
Meanwhile, his sister seems to have decided that her mother’s nerves are not as pretty when they’re not frayed around the edges, and has increased her whining by about 300%.
A quick peruse of the archives here shows that I wrote about Camilla’s whining five months ago. It had gotten better since then, but now it’s worse again, which is discouraging and certainly doesn’t make those long Daddy-less periods easier to survive.
I’m hoping the two are directly related and that once all my husband’s business travel is over, my daughter will back off on the whining. But as I deal with it while trying to keep calm, I try to remind myself that it could be worse. At least Blaise was obliging enough to end his extremely frustrating stage before Camilla began hers again!
My husband generally brings home small presents from his trips. I’m thinking for this next one, he could bring me a pair of ear plugs.
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