Hush Little Baby, Don't Say a Word

Son One identifies what kind of "gon" an oyster cracker is

Now that the pandemic seems to be winding down, everyone's lost postponed trips are finally happening, and we find ourselves being visited twice over. My brother Andy and his wife Jess are here in Florida at the same time Hayley's brother Shane and his wife Leah are! So we have had a busy week.

Last Friday, Shane and Leah came and spent the afternoon and did dinner with us after flying in, before driving out to their condo on St. Pete Beach. Sunday, we drove out to see them and spent the afternoon on the beach, and then went up to Clearwater to celebrate Father's Day by eating Skyline Chili and Rita's. Monday, we drove down to Lido Beach where Andy and Jess were staying; we played on the beach that afternoon, went to dinner with them, spent the night in the hotel, and did more with them the next day before driving back home. I'm typing this up on Thursday, but it will post on Friday, when we plan to go to the Florida Aquarium here in Tampa with Shane and Leah.

All of this is a lot if you are a toddler, as Son One is, and unfortunately losses in emotional control tend to be matched by losses in bodily control. He is potty training, and for a while it seemed like we had a total backslide. (We are using the Oh Crap! method, and he is in stage two/three, where he goes commando.)

On Tuesday especially we were all tuckered out. Son One had clearly been tired Monday night (he asked to go to bed!) but also has trouble going to sleep in a new environment. He bounced around a lot in his hotel bed, so I had to lay down next to him and gently restrain him while singing, "Hush little baby, don't say a word, Daddy's gonna buy you a mockingbird..." For a while, I improvised new verses ("If that clown doesn't make you laugh, Daddy's gonna buy you a wizard staff...") but then he requested the song be about Momma, so I sang him the traditional verses over again with Momma. Then, to his request, himself, the baby, Oracle (our cat), Bluesies (our fish), Uncle Andy, Aunt Jess, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Duckie, and Erin and Josh (family friends) before he finally fell asleep. We had started bedtime a little after 7pm, and I think he finally fell asleep around 9. I had thought I might sneak out of the room once both kids fell asleep and either hang out with Andy and Jess or read in the lobby, but I was actually drifting off faster than he was! I woke up around midnight, though, and actually got ready for bed, and then had trouble getting back to sleep.

"I don't build things, I only mash things."

But of course I was woken up by Son One at 5:30am. "Daddy, you don't go in my bed!" The baby had a fever Monday night, so he and Hayley stayed inside at the hotel that morning while Son One and I went to the beach. (If you go out to the beach at 8:30am, you will have it to yourself!) Then we packed up and checked out and ate lunch, and then Son One and I went swimming in the hotel pool, and then we hit the road. With Hayley tending to the baby, it was all me with Son One, who was beginning to need a lot of ushering and prodding with all the back and forthing of loading the car and getting ready. Plus he is afraid of vacuum cleaners, and housekeeping parked their vacuum outside of our door and we had to keep going past it. Son One slept on the drive home, but that's just an hour, and his usual nap length is around two.

Son One's bedtime was early and went smoothly, and I was planning on an early bedtime myself, crawling into bed at 9pm. But even though the baby's fever was gone, he was unhappy, and he couldn't fall asleep. Every time Hayley would get him to sleep in the rocker or walking him around, he would wake up on being transferred to the bassinet, or shortly thereafter. Often he will nurse to sleep (less often these days, though), but he was totally uninterested in it. Eventually Hayley asked me to take over, and alternating between walking and rocking, while blasting pink noise at him and singing "Hush Little Baby," I finally got him to go to sleep around 11:15pm. I played it safe, though, and did not move from the rocker until 11:45, when I successfully transferred him to the bassinet and finally went to bed myself.

So of course Son One woke up during the night at 2am and 5am, and then permanently at 5:30am. He wandered around while I dozed on the couch, but soon made his way into our bedroom, where he wanted to get into bed with Hayley and the baby. The problem is that he is a very physically active snuggler, and the baby needed his rest! When he disregarded Hayley's admonition to stay away from the baby, I picked him up, and he-- who has always struggled with emotional control-- totally lost it. As I carried him out, he managed to grab the baby monitor from the dresser and clamped down on its power cord in his teeth. So in trying to get him out of the bedroom to stop him from bothering the sleeping baby, I ended up having a contest of extracting a power cord from his mouth just a few feet away from the baby.

I did win, and I got him out of the bedroom and locked the door. He proceeded to cry at the door. We have been trying to practice the How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen method on him, which defuses outbursts by naming and acknowledging the feeling... but I can honestly never get this to work. When I say, "You feel sad/mad/upset right now," he just gets upset at me and tells me to go way or stop talking. Eventually he hit me, so I put him in his room. How to Talk says not to use time outs, but I was on too short a tether myself to do anything else; I didn't want him hitting me. I did let him out pretty quickly, but he cried in his room for a while before coming out and returning to crying at the master bedroom door.

I decided at that point the best thing to do was let him be and hope that the pink noise in the bedroom was enough to stop the baby from hearing him. So I began preparing my coffee and breakfast and would periodically offer him breakfast. Eventually, he took up one of my offers of oatmeal and came over and ate half a bowl and then asked for a bagel with "chocolate butter." I think it was around 7am by this time, so there had been a solid hour of meltdown at least.

"I am going to startle my brother. EXTERMINATE!"

So, we decided to not really go anywhere Wednesday or Thursday, to allow him to glom back on to his usual routine and get some rest and thus emotional stability. He slept until 6:45am Thursday morning! Thus allowing me to sleep until 7am.

Anyway, I have no big parenting insight here except to say managing someone else's emotions is more draining than managing your own!