Thank you for not being perky

We have a boneless baby on our hands and he likes to scream and fling himself to the ground and then wiggle around like a fish out of water sometimes scooting himself clear across the room. It’s highly unpleasant and makes me sigh loudly and roll my eyes (bad parenting notch #45556). He did not do this while I was gone at all apparently.

When I got off the plane Jack WAS NOT happy to see me. He lowered his head and stuck out his lips and furrowed his brown in classic Jack fashion. But then I got a little smile and a little bit of peaking at me. When I held him he cried for his dad and flung himself out of my arms. Oh how sad it was for me!! But by the time we got into the car he was getting used to me again and when we got home I was in the right context and he was pretty happy to snuggle me and read some books. The next day he was totally normal.

Except for this boneless problem. If I recall correctly he started doing this at some other point. maybe around 17 months? And he did it for a a few weeks and then it petered out. My theory is that he is having a bit of a communication break through but not quite fast enough for what he needs to express and thus, the extra frustration.

I love that he finally says moma. a few mornings ago I heard him say, “where’s moma?”. It was SO CUTE. Some of the words he uses most often are, hot, moma, walk, cold, milk, car, go, more (accompanied by hand sign), kitty, train and shoe. And he definitely says new words everyday AND still talks in his gibberish language. I am so going to miss the gibberish language. Where’s moma?, totally counts as a sentence I think. I’m not sure if I’ve heard him use any other two word combination. Maybe he’s said, “It hot!”.

It’s hard to know what do when he flings himself to the ground. I’ve been trying different things (besides rolling my eyes) and I think I’m going to stick to what I was trying to do the last time he was in this phase which is to
first acknowledge that hes frustrated,
spend a bit trying to help him
A. figure out what the problem is or
B. communicate what the problem is,
C. try to figure it out myself based on situation

I think it is key to make sure that all this doesn’t take more than like 30 seconds or so. And I’m not so big on making a ton of sympathetic noises. It’s not that I’m NOT sympathetic… it’s just that I don’t want to end up making it a huge DEAL. I think this goes against the Harvey Karp method of mimicking their distress to make sure they know you fully understand. I’ve not ever been sure I’ve gotten that to work.

So then, I let him know that when he’s done crying we can do whatever, read a book, have some milk, etc.

My ‘what to expect from the toddler years’ book is kind of useless. It’s broken up in this question and answer format, which is fine, except that the questions are like, “my son freaks out when i try to put shoes on him” and then there will be this LONG ASS answer and then the NEXT question will be “my daughter hates it when i put her coat on and wont stop crying” with a similarly long answer and then then next one will be all about how one kids hates have his hair brushed. I mean, did they want to go through every possible thing a kid could object to? like a long dumb books organized stupidly? Next time I recommend they have a chapter titled ‘your kid will hate shit, here’s how to deal’.

My problem is that I have a hard time being consistent which is what all the baby books tell you to be.

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