the every day stuff

It’s funny how the memories that I want to bottle up and save so that in later years I can take the top off, take a little sniff and be transported back to that moment aren’t necessarily the ones that I can blog about, point to and have the whole world sigh with me in understanding.


Last night for example. Ethan is teething [and as a side note if you’re not a parent and want an idea of what living with a teething toddler would be like, just imagine putting something rather sharp in your shoe and walking around like that for several days. Then just when you’re getting used to the constant pain, go ahead and stick a fork in your eye for the grand finale. Then the next morning however, instead of being in even more pain, everyone wakes up feeling fine and life continues until the next little white enamel razor begins to erupt.]

So, back to my story, even though he wasn’t feeling well he went down for the night pretty easily around 7:45. It was a short-lived victory. A little after nine I was falling in and out of dream-land (mostly in) when he started crying. When I went in to get him, it took me 10 minutes of talking and rubbing his head to get him to slow his sobbing enough to crawl over where I could reach into the crib and get him. This is not typical. Normally his crying is more of a whiney thing and all he wants is to be in mommy’s arms.

If there was ever a disadvantage of having a child who sleeps through the night, it’s that on the rare occasion that he wakes up before morning, he is convinced that it IS morning and no amount of convincing or denying him the morning routine is going to change his mind. For Ethan, morning means heading straight to mommy and daddy’s room for some milk and cuddling, and usually falling back asleep for a few minutes or a few hours – depending on the day. He makes his wishes clear by repeating over and over “milk-milk….daddy…milk-milk” and if it’s taking too long “bed-bed”. I held out on him for a little while but finally the dad took pity on his little man, vacated his video game spot in the bedroom and sent us in to lay down.

With the Motrin kicking in and his world set back on its axis again, Ethan was asleep in a matter of minutes, sprawled across the middle of the bed with only his feet strategically touching my back. When Darrell came in an hour later I decided to risk moving him back to bed, and surprisingly we were successful. Darrell carried him and I followed to make sure he settled in okay. And right then, standing there in his room, listening to his breathing return to normal as he settled in, I knew this was one of the ones I wanted to save forever. Not because teething is so much fun or I felt like such a good mother at the moment (quite the opposite, really). There was just something indescribably awesome about standing there together with our helpless, hurting little man and knowing that we’d gotten him through, at least for the moment and we'd done it together.

I know I've been absent from the whole blogging scene. I’ve just looked back and realized just how much I have failed to write about and it feels weird to jump back in "in the middle" but if I try to catch up I'll never start again.