ahh... peace reigns in our quiet little home..

lovely little day today,

oh, apart from a major meltdown at my mum's house - complete with head banging and flailing and wailing - he was completely out of control, completely lost in a maelstrom of emotional pain.
i carried him to a quiet room, and he calmed right down, and talked with me as if nothing had happened... then i brought him back to the living room (where my dad and sis and mum were), and right away he falls back into the maelstrom. i bring him back out, and he calms again.
odd huh?!
i guess it was several things... too much stimulation (dad was playing big fun games), too much attention (everyone looking at him), maybe some underlying unspoken tension (family stuff)..?

anyway, it was so brief, that the only thing that's remaining about it as i process it is... how odd? how out of place, how sudden? how he's never usually like that, apart from a few very squingy episodes over the last few days... i wonder why..
maybe, together with the bad sleep, it's a molar thing? he was biting his teeth together alot before all this, and i've spotted him clenching his jaw and looking internally a bit these days...

anyway, as i said, it was a good day, and one that reassures me that my boy is still as i know him, and i still am a good enough mum, and we enjoy each other's company, which right now feels like the most important thing.

we went to get some sushi, we hung out at the library, went to my mum's.

in the evening we played in the garden; we each grabbed a bucket, i filled mine from the washing machine, and added charlie carp. he asked for some too, so i dripped some in his bucket. then we watered our precious berries, even he tipping his bucket onto his favourite plants. and we confirmed that no berries had appeared since we last checked them yesterday.
then we played in our little playground in our beautiful front garden - lots of climbing and sliding, lots of trampolining.

our trampoline is the setting for so much joy, what would i do without it?
we lie and marvel at the vast blueness of the sky, edged all around with leaves from our beautiful tree (i do so love that tree, only that one) (it has a mix of either branches with only solid green leaves, or branches only with leaves which are variegated with cream. isn't that odd?), and kick our legs in the air to see them against the sky. we have 3 different bouncing games, a running in circles game, a pull-me-up-and-fall-down game. we call for our dog to see her running back, we squiz at her through the mat, we/i check under the trampoline to see if she's there.
then we sit/lie on it and read our junk mail, until it's dusk and mosquitoes come out.
on our way back to the door, dan runs after holly and bossily orders her to eat something he found, which she wisely ignores.

i finally borrowed a bunch of books from the library - i've been so borrowed-book starved! i generated a massive fine (from one lot, about 15 books kept a week late, massively adds up), and couldn't bear to pay it again (it's happened before), so have been waiting on andrew to get a membership that i could use and start anew on with good intentions. and he did so and gave it to me along with my xmas pressent!

i got harvey karp's "happiest toddler on the block", and robin grille's "parenting for a peaceful world" which i'm eagerly anticipating being as rockin as others have made out. dan loves the cover, squealing over the oil illustration of naked kidlets amongst gigantic sunflowers.

maybe i should grow us some sunflowers? they're pretty darn amazing things.

tonight i lay in bed reading as he fell asleep - so much better than just lying there staring into the dark! a few minutes before, he picked up one of my books, and joined me in lying on our tummies and reading.. he stared very hard into a printed page, staying very still, then gave me a cheeky humourous twinkle at his own mimicky cleverness.

then when he fell asleep, i kissed him many times on his mouth, and breathed in his milky sweetness, and ruffled his hair. i love him so much i could implode.
every day he's becoming someone "other", more separate from me... from the newborn baby of your own flesh, to the eye-gazing infant to whom you're all the universe, to the little child to whom you're the rock and foundation of the exciting out-there world.
i know him both more and less now than when he first fell out of me.. he's his own person, someone i can only try to get to know... i have to keep reminding myself that he's not an extension of myself, he is not all the best things of myself, he is just who he is. and though i love him more fiercely than i do sometimes myself, my role is only to support him in his growth.
i love this job.

ohh... it's been a tough few days!

the nights have been, anyway. lots of waking, lots of the kind of boobing where he won't let go of my nipple for one minute all night, without reprieve. i feel exhausted again just remembering this.
all that grabbing, hungry voracious trapping arms and jaws holding me in position all night... where the inch at the end of my nipple is the inch distance between me and being able to fall backwards into decent sleep.

and last night, there was a complete wakeup. a bounce upright, perky eyed and voiced in the pitch dark, announcing readiness for games and playing. almost sweet... if i weren't in the middle of the deepest sleep.
we were up for 2 hours, and then i was up for a half hour after he finally fell asleep.

and then this evening, i made the mistake of breaking our routine.
instead of dinner-playground- wind down inside, i did: playground, dinner, play at grandma's, drive home to sleep.
big mistake....: he was all amped up playing at grandma's, no amount of gentle coercing or offering of choices or anything in the GD book would get him to willingly leave... in the end we had to carry out an unwilling child, who clamored and cried for boobing all the way home (the longest 4 minutes of my life), and then when we got home, begged and pleaded to go to the playground, even though it was already dusk and mosquitoes were out.
we ended up with him sobbing in my arms in bed: him flinging himself heartbrokenly into my arms and throwing his little arms tightly around me, while he sobbed...

i patted and crooned a while, then we sat in front of tv and watched shorts of a penguin doco, during which he fell asleep on my lap. where, other than a long boobing interruption, he's remained since...

i don't know which feels more unbearable to me, actually going through all of this, or the loud litany of painful doubt.
why is he like this? is this because of how i've parented him? has my parenting been too child-centred / lacking in boundaries / inconsistent?

and then all the thoughts about night-weaning....
i no longer know anyone personally who's still night feeding a toddler...

i don't know if there's any more good reason to not night wean, other than he's intensely resistant to the suggestion and seems intensely dependent on it, and i think it would be forceful and traumatic to undergo night weaning now.

and i wonder whether i've completely screwed him up; is it right that he's completely dependent on boobing to fall and refall asleep all through the night, at 2 years old?
i do feel like i've completely screwed up, or missed some very important boat..

i feel as i did when i was in primary school, when i completely missed doing a test that every single one of the students sitting around me did from start to finish, because i was talking and in my own world.
or in high school, where i found myself suddenly alone standing in the square, as every other student in school had gone to an assembly that i alone had no idea about.

okay, so my logical or wiser subset tells me:
i was clingy and fussy, andrew was clingy and fussy; dandan is clingy and fussy and would be probably more so if he wasn't APed. this is probably the best version of him at this age that he could have been....
and that with his sleep; he needs this slow start up, he needs this hand-holding, to gradually find his own sleep-legs in his own readiness.
besides, that his bad sleep has only happened in occasional periods over the last year, and often coinciding with spurts of height or braininess; that largely he's been sleeping well (20 minutes of falling-asleep, 4-6 hours of non-waking, 10-12 hour nights).
and that, my god, he's 2.... this is just what it's like. especially when you mess up their end of day routine...

i feel a weariness inside my spirit, amped up by tiredness. i could sleep to fill the latter, but to fill the former, i'm going to stay up some more and read and think.