The reason I haven't been writing much

I had a melt down the other night. I hadn’t been in a good mood in about a week and Mr. Doodlebug was getting tired of my curtness. I think day after day after day of taking care of baby Doodle without a break for almost an entire year is starting to grate on me.

Baby Doodle was a very good baby – he still is – but lately he has been clingy (he cries whenever I put him down), whiney, and tired but won’t sleep. We have had a great night time routine for months now. We put BD in his pajamas, let him play for a little while in the family room and read him a few books. Then I nurse him and carry him to his crib, still awake, where he lies without making a peep until he falls asleep. We’ve been following our same schedule, but now when I put him in his crib he screams and crawls to the end of the crib closest to the door, pulls himself up and cries until someone comes in and lays him back down. Tuesday night he cried for an hour before I went upstairs.

It is truly depressing to have everything we’ve been working on for so long just go out the window. It’s depressing, too, to have a clearly unhappy baby who’s not getting the sleep he needs. Last night, I let him cry for about a half hour then I went up and rubbed his back until he fell asleep, which didn’t take long because he was exhausted.

Today, we went to our weekly playgroup. Baby Doodle was tired when we got there, but I thought he would rally once he saw all the new toys. How wrong I was. He played with the host’s daughter until two of the other moms and their sons arrived. Then he wanted to be held. I held him and gave him some fruit. Then he cried when the fruit was gone and wouldn’t stop crying. So we left about a half hour after we got there. That, too, was depressing. It’s one of the organized, weekly activities we do that I really look forward to and we had to cut it short because of BD’s mood. I know that will not be the last time – we have yet to enter toddlerhood.

When we got home I fed him lunch, then spent 45 minutes lying next to him on the guest bed. I had to struggle him down on the mattress eight or nine times to keep him from getting up and crawling away. He was extremely tired but wouldn’t close his eyes. Finally, he succumbed to the exhaustion and fell asleep. He’s upstairs on the guest bed now and if he crawls off the bed onto the carpeted floor so be it. I can’t spend my days lying next to him while he sleeps – and the crib, forget it.

My solution is to find a babysitter who can babysit BD once a week for two hours to give me a break. The last two breaks I’ve had from him I was at the dentist, and the time before that was in December! I’m dying here.