Schedule Disruption

We went to my family in Wilmington over Memorial Day. My daughter was 7, my brother-in-law 37, and my mother was 70. So it was a good celebration (except perhaps when I dropped the cake my sister made and broke her wedding present cake stand, or when there was arguing in front of extended family). But things were disrupted. Naps (those few naps my son still enjoys) were missed altogether, or were at oddly late or early times. Bedtimes were scrambled. Waking up was super early to the glory of playing with cousins and other excellent family members. We exacerbated the problem by driving from 4 am to 11 am Tuesday morning to avoid being in the car so long on my daughter's actual birthday.

So my poor son has been unraveled all week. Two naps from which he woke after a sad, short 30 minutes. (My children have never had short naps - anything less than two hours is exceptional.) Today is probably the longest subjective day I've ever had. Many trips were canceled because of tantrums in the middle of the store. (I'm not sure that going to "buy Mommy a new phone" was a bright idea, but he talked about it enthusiastically for a while.

Pretty much all day has been crying or screaming, with a few storms of throwing tossed in for variety. Me, I'm alternately saying things like "Don't hit me, I don't like that, if you are mad say 'I am mad at Daddy.'" and things like "You want the sandwich here? No, here? Not the sandwich, you want the back-hoe? I can't see what you are pointing at, can you tell me a word?" Despite all these efforts, and despite offering holding and sitting next to him, offering singing, and so forth, even having returned pacifiers to him, he has been in such palpable agony all day. No clue as to whether food or sleep or picking sister up at school is next, he writhes, rejecting touch, rejecting his sling (which at 38 pounds or whatever is mostly just a thing to hold that's been constant since birth), throwing the binky out the window of the car as we drive, rejecting songs, rejecting everything. We had some bronze shoe sales person here during a time when he was sitting in the stroller yelling one thing after another, and the sales person (no doubt horrified, but I lacked enough attention to really glance at him other than to figure out how to buy bronzed shoes for the screaming child) said, he'd have snapped or yelled at the kid by now; I confessed to having tried that a few times to no avail. Even when Mom blessedly left work early, the spiral continued, uglier and more painful until slipping into the bonds of morpheus at an impressively early hour, hopefully to be renewed.

PS I wrote this on Friday, but didn't have the presence to publish until now. He slept 13 hours both weekend nights and enjoyed 1 three hour nap over the weekend, and has been only 1/2 crazed this week. I'd say it has been a great week so far, but he did throw two back-hoes and a stream-roller out of the window of our moving car while we were driving to school a few hours ago. The back-hoes were recovered without harm, but, in an irony I cannot share with him, the steam-roller was driven over and flattened. The difference from last week is that after we got his sister, he rejoined civilization. Whew.