Life These Days

Toddler-hood seems quite different from baby-hood. Even though we still consider Hudson a baby, he is proving to us every day that he is, indeed, a very independent toddler now, which is a totally different ballgame. I’m trying to get with the program here, but it seems rules are changing by the hour.

For example, last night we had what seemed like an ordinary evening routine — dinner, bath, bottle, cuddling, prayer, and sleep. Husband and I then had dinner ourselves and watched us some Office. This show makes my day and I am not sure why I never gave it chance. Dwight Schrute alone makes it all worth it.

Anyway, our baby toddler woke up crying a couple of hours after we put him to bed, so I did what I always do — fed him a bottle and put him back down. Problem solved. Back to Dwight Schrute who was pepper spraying people and euthanizing a cat in the freezer. Hudson seemed to have gone back to sleep and I thought nothing of it.

A couple of hours after we fed him his late night bottle, just as I was turning in for the night, he woke up again. Of course. He always has perfect timing like that. It’s like he has a radar that goes off every time I am ready to get any semblance of rest, be it a nap or what I hope to become an eight-hour-of-sleep kind of a night.

At this point I was sure his teeth were bothering him, so Tylenol was administered and another bottle generously offered. Nothing soothed him. And, by that I mean he wailed like an injured walrus, rocking back and forth, kicking his legs, flailing his arms, hitting his head violently on my shoulder.

I am certain that Hudson has always known what he wanted, but couldn’t tell us (I’m smart like that). Now that he is a toddler, not only does he know what he wants, he can somewhat communicate it. This is a new trick in his ever-expanding arsenal and I sometimes am not fond of it.

Back to the injured walrus. I knew with some amount of certainty that he did not want to stay in his room. Is he scared of the dark? Does he need his door left ajar? One of us in the room with him? The closer we got to the kitchen, the quieter he got. I should have known right then and there, but it’s a guessing game sometimes. Another bottle was offered and rejected. Songs were sung. A tiny little back was rubbed and attempts at rocking were made. Still wailing and flailing.

After about an hour of this I was ready to try anything. So I thought maybe we should offer this child some food. Like, real food. I couldn’t believe it myself. Here I was, half-awake, with a hysterical child on my shoulder, asking my husband to mix some cereal. I assure you that this has never happened before. Not at midnight anyway.

I put Hudson in his high chair and he proceeded to inhale two bowls of oatmeal cereal. At freaking midnight. Within minutes he went back to sleep and stayed asleep until 8 am this morning. Blew all my parenting theories right out the window. I do know this — he is teething and while that doesn’t give him diarrhea or a high fever, he definitely gets the munchies and can eat unimaginable quantities of food 24/7.

To add insult to injury, after all these midnight shenanigans, I was jarred awake by an alarm set on a cell phone at 7 am. At first I thought it was my husband’s, but after running around the house looking for said cell phone, I realized that our toddler set an alarm on a cell phone that we no longer use and that is his to play with. He’s thirteen months old for goodness sake. I didn’t own a cell phone, let alone know how to set an alarm on it until I was in my twenties.

It amazes me that a barely one-year-old is able to turn on blue tooth, take pictures, enter contacts, and set a FREAKING alarm on a cell phone that is out-of-service. What’s next? I’ll wake up and my car is missing because Hudson felt like pancakes for breakfast?