Toddlers

I figure kids are considered toddlers from age one until they turn four. So about three years of toddlerhood. With ten children, that means I’m at 30 years of toddlers. Not consecutively, because we don’t do things the easy way around here. I’ve had a toddler or two for twenty years straight, less a year and a half when Stellan turned four before Creed was born.

Lachlan, though, is the toddlerest toddler I’ve ever toddlered. As Blaine so lovingly put it, we might not have had ten children if we’d have started out this way.

All of that, for this story. We’ve managed to begin my week off of bus driving for spring break with a puke bug. Lachlan started it right after supper Friday night, Creed joined the ranks soon after, and Charlotte by the middle of the night. Saturday and Sunday were days of little puke but headaches by a few. Sunday night Stellan lost his supper and Creed and Lach both got sick again after a day and a half not throwing up.

Count it all joy. Count it all joy.

About 4am Monday morning, Lachlan was wailing from his mat on the living room floor and nothing would calm him down. I spent so many minutes in my “please let me go back to sleep” delirium coddling and comforting and snuggling and trying to figure out what was wrong while he wailed and sobbed and tried to talk. But Lachlan has hundreds of words and about half of them are really hard to understand.

For example: he calls Creed “Creeder”. This comes out as “duh-der”. It’s a long standing funny to make him say “Creed’s shirt” because it comes out “duh-der der”.

So these were the circumstances I was working with at 4am. I understood Charlotte, but he insisted he didn’t WANT Charlotte. I thought I heard either sweatshirt, blanket, or towel, but all three were not making sense. Blaine took him outside, aiming for distraction. He was hysterical. I cuddled him and offered to put him in my bed. He refused. He laid back down and wailed louder. Blaine took him potty. He came back out and got out that he wanted Momma to put his pants back on. So I stripped him down and put them right back on. He calmed slightly. I offered my bed again. He refused. Then he slid off my lap, marched to his sleeping mat, pulled the top blanket off and threw it at me, and laid down. He’d taken off Charlotte’s baby blanket. I asked if he wanted it on top of him. He definitely didn’t want her blanket near him. And then he went to sleep happily.

Terrible twos always sounded like an excuse for bad parenting and failure to teach self control. I stand corrected. Lachlan is a whole new experience for me. The other day he was hysterical because his pants have stripes on one leg and not the other. He wore those pants for weeks happily before he decided they were NOT acceptable.

OCD, perhaps?