Teething bites. For everyone. JJ is normally a very happy baby, and even when teething pains strike, he's not usually too much of a grumpy puss during the day. No... the trouble in this house is at NIGHT. He fights going to sleep, he wants to nurse for half an hour after dozing off before he will permit me to actually lay him down, then he proceeds to wake up every forty-five minutes to nurse some more. Then, around one or two in the morning, we get to the REALLY fun part. That's when he usually decides that nursing is insufficient comfort and spends a good two hours being fully awake and wanting to play.
I usually end up either sobbing or screaming with frustration, because all I want to do at that point sleep. Especially after John and I spent the day before moving things (large things) around in the garage and carrying boxes downstairs to free up space. My legs are screaming and my ankles and hips aren't happy either.
In the end, nothing "gentle" persuades him to go back to sleep during these early AM party sessions. He will lay quietly nursing for hours, with his eyes wide open and staring at me in the dim light that sneaks around the curtains. When my nipples can't take it anymore, he is equally happy to crawl around on the bed, smacking whatever parts of me he can reach with gleeful abandon. Hard. By the time the second hour rolls around, he's already had fresh orajel applied and gotten a dose of baby Tylenol, so by this point I'm usually reduced to softly begging.
Which never works.
What does work (usually, and only towards the end of said second hour) is simply holding the little monkey in a nice cradling cuddle and refusing to let him move from that position.
Baby. Loses. His. Damn. Mind.
Seriously, you'd think I was dipping the kid in boiling acid or something. Arching, shrieking (not screaming, SHRIEKING), thrashing, anything to wiggle loose and get me to let him keep playing. And I have to keep it up for a solid sixty seconds until he stops fighting and is just crying, then it's back to the boob and he usually drops right off to sleep shortly thereafter.
At which point Mommy curls into a little ball and sobs quietly into her pillows because morning is only about 2 hours away. Singing, nursing, rocking, fresh diaper, orajel, baby tylenol, scalp massage, foot/calf rubs, cuddling, binky, all the standard stuff calms him but nothing works to actually get him to go back to sleep, and I'm out of ideas. I HATE doing that to him, listening to those enraged, betrayed howls rips my heart out, but it's the only thing that's working lately.
It's after 8 now, and JJ is still sleeping, because when the alarm went off at 6:30 I just was not ready to face the day. At all. My body hurts, I'm not the least bit hungry even though I know I really should eat, and all I want to do is mainline both of us some Nyquil so he'll sleep for a few more hours and I can greet the afternoon in a saner frame of mind.
But yeah...we have too much to get done today.
Aaaaaaaaand there he is, sleepy little monkey.
