Blindsided

The kids are truly wonderful. Almost never a real bad day. So the complete personality switch that happened this morning hit me like a ton of bricks. We have now had our first full-out tantrum. And the Emmy goes to... CADEN!!!

I should have seen him working up to this. He’s been a little testy. Not quite combative, but upset enough that we were wracking our brains trying to think... Could it be gas, he’s arching his back. Can you have appendicitis this young, he’s backstroking across the floor. Is his airway constricted, he sounds like he’s growling more than crying... But these moments happened in isolation, not all at once like today, so I didn’t see the freight train speeding down the tracks. Maybe I should have read ahead in the baby books. Or maybe I should have just been wiser, I mean it’s not like I haven’t seen a tantrum before. Hello, I was a teacher for 13 years. But it’s hard to think rationally when all you want to do is make the screaming and flailing stop. Well, that or teleport.

All morning Caden was a little complainer. Getting worse and worse with each little thing that went wrong. Never mind all the good things of this morning, it was just a downward spiral from the get go for Hurricane Caden. Until the eye-wall hit about 11:15.

Except that I tried my best, by all accounts I did just about everything wrong. I tried to console him. I distracted him with things he shouldn’t have. I put him down but picked him right back up when he got worse. I ignored Addison, who needed me too. (Did I mention that in the middle of all this I managed to prepare lunch, get Addison started eating and call my husband for moral support?) Finally, after 45 minutes of high-drama I was ready to do alot of things, including head to the doctor’s office in my pajamer-jams and/or call Travis home from work. But I didn’t. Because I got wise? Nope, it was because of Addison.

Sweetest girl was sitting in her chair, sucking her thumb and crying. (Who am I kidding, we were ALL crying by that point!!) She’d only eaten a few bites but had finished her milk so I scooped her up, changed her and took her to bed a few minutes early as I made my mental checklist... Find something totally forbidden to see if Caden’s really hurting (the unplugged toaster). Feed him while playing with said item if he’s not (it was like butter it was so simple). Put him to bed in a hurry (cake!) before you string him up by his toes for causing such an upset in our day. (Seriously, I was ready to throw down, not so much because the tantrum was hard for me but because I’d failed so miserably at managing things and had unintentionally helped his tantrum persist. What should have been one little upset apple cart multiplied into three carts of oozing applesauce.)

Nope, he wasn’t sick or hurt. Silly Mama! With my 20/20 hindsight I can see that he was just being a 16 month old who lives large in every way. And just like that it was all over. Well, sort of over. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Game on Caden.