Thursday, August 09, 2007

More advice, plus the tale of a tantrum

Two more good pieces of advice to add to my list from a few days ago.

The first is courtesy of my own dear old dad: when you're 17 (or 21 or 30), and your father offers to buy you some tools, don't scoff; take him up on it because one day you will need them. You may not appreciate screwdrivers when you're 21 (except for the Smirnoff variety), but you sure will be thankful that you have them when you are a new parent and every single freakin' baby device requires the deft use of a Philips head screwdriver. Take the tools. Tools=good.

The second is this: when you're cooking, err on the side of adding too little salt rather than too much because you can always add more salt later. It's harder to take it away when you've already dumped it in there. Then you end up feeding your poor starving resident husband too-salty scrambled eggs and he gamely eats them anyway because he's wasting away from working without eating but you know they were lousy and doesn't he deserve better than that for working 100-hour weeks in the NICU?

On a completely different note...William is still somewhat in the clingy mode, almost a week after returning home. He's started screeching really loudly when he wakes up, and it just escalates. When I walk into his room, he has big wet tears on his red face, and he's nearly hysterical. Then it takes forever for him to really calm down, and woe unto you if you pick him up and then try to put him down while he's still wound up. Earlier today, he woke up too early from a nap. He was a mess. Screeching, crying those big tears, arching his back, having a regular ol' fit. But nothing made him happy. Not milk. Not ice water. Not reading one of his Maisie books or an issue of Babybug (his current obsessions). Not being held.

Finally, he stopped shrieking enough to sit in my lap and lift the flaps for a few pages of a Maisie book, but as soon as we reached the end of the book, he went nuts again. It's like he is trying to let us know that he is an honest-to-goodness toddler now, and with that label comes the right to have regular loud tantrums for no discernable reason. Luckily, he eventually consented to drinking some milk and reading the Maisie book again, and that seemed to do the trick. Weird, though.

And he was in perfectly fine spirits the rest of the evening, even though I dragged him to the library to check out books. When we got home, he just toddled merrily around the family room, depositing chip clips (for some reason, he loves to steal the chip clips out of their drawer and play with them) in the end table drawers and bringing the animals from his Noah's Ark over to me and then snatching them away and running off with a giggle.

Toddlers=weird.

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