The spare brain strikes again…

“Saturate me with your grace, Lord. Be the patience that I need today.”

I knew it wasn’t going to be easy but I think I must have had my spare brain in when I decided that starting a work-at-home-mum business just as Baby was hitting four months old and Boy was doing the usual child thing of running on fresh air and love and crashing out before dinnertime and being hungry all night meaning parents are getting barely any sleep was possibly a good idea.

It IS a good idea. My spare brain is actually quite intuitive and in tune with God I think. (It was that brain that got me married to Messy Dad, after all!) It’s just my regular brain tends to get a little lost in the logistics and day-to-day struggles and can get a little grumpy as a result. Especially after a night like last night. My four and a half month old Baby sleeps like a dream at night. Wakes a couple times for milk and then goes back to sleep. My three and a half year old Boy didn’t have any dinner before begging to go to bed, and so was unable to stay asleep because by midnight he was hungry and until we pretty much bullied him into going to sleep (in as un-aggressive a way as possible) at four-ish none of us got much sleep. We are all running on empty a bit today.

Most of Boy’s upsets seem to manifest physically in a tummyache so it can be quite hard to figure out exactly what’s going on, and therefore what the most useful thing to do to fix the problem is. His answer to everything, predictably, is to come for a booby cuddle but as much as that helps him psychologically sometimes there needs to be something else. If we’d not been quite so tired and frazzled last night I might have taken him down for a bowl of cereal or something but tiredness and frazzledness won. This morning he went downstairs with daddy who gave him breakfast and went off to work leaving Boy watching television – a fairly normal occurrence, a habit that started during pregnancy when I needed that extra bit of space to come round slowly in the mornings. A couple hours later he came up begging for milk and after much discussion it turned out he was lonely – he was all by himself, and it hurt in his tummy.

I’m reluctant to wean him, still. I’d much rather he came to that decision by himself. The same as him moving back into his own room and his own bed – not that that stands much chance at the moment as his room has become a halfway house between the loft and the rest of the house! I don’t want him to view his booby cuddles as a crutch, a fix-it mechanism. What I REALLY don’t want is for him to start making excuses to have beebee (although as I said earlier, it’s helpful to know what the reason is, because then I can find him something to eat or drink or some medicine or extra comfort or just a chat if needed as well). I’d rather simply be available, and let him grow up at his own (frighteningly fast sometimes) rate.

The faster he’s growing up, the more he needs to keep reminding himself that I’m his constant in this rapidly changing world of his. And his way of doing that, of making sure I concentrate on him and he on me, is a booby cuddle.

I am praying (seriously) that it’s not for that much longer.

But…

…. that said …

I don’t want to push him to grow up before he is ready.

Not much evidence of growing up in this one huh. At least, not sensibly, anyway...

Not much evidence of growing up in this one either 😉