Nursing Your Kids

Two-year-olds are crazy. Bipolar possibly. Really, really, nuts. Sam’s moods veer wildly between angelic and horrifying. He’s like the little girl with the curl right in the middle of her forehead. When he’s good, he’s very, very good. But when he’s bad he’s just horrid.

There are days when he wakes up smiling and cuddly and happily plays quietly for a while, eats breakfast, gets dressed and goes out for the day. Other days it’s like I’m torturing him by bringing the wrong fork or plate, or cutting his waffles too big or too small. He’ll freak out over something tiny and wail for what seems like hours, angrily making his little dictator demands. When we go to leave the house he’ll run off without me, causing me and my fat, pregnant ass to chase him all the way to the corner where he’ll either turn and keep running without crossing the street or turn around to grin at me.

A few mornings ago, for no reason at all, Sam bit me right in the belly. We’d just eaten a nice, weekend breakfast of blueberry pancakes and bacon and Sam was hanging out on my lap being silly. He was standing facing me, holding my hands and jumping up and down, laughing and talking about jumping on mama. He collapsed onto me into what I thought was a hug then bit me, hard, right on my belly. I think he caught a piece of the baby’s foot because the baby freaked out kicking and moving. It hurt like hell and I have a nasty bruise on my stomach. Sam still feels badly about it. When he lifts up my shirt to look at the baby he’ll talk about the boo boo and say, “Sam bit me.” (when do they start getting their pronouns right?)

Yesterday, a no nap day, Sam did not want me to leave his side during the portion of the afternoon he should have been soundly asleep. He cuddled in my lap and asked me to read the same terribly written Thomas the Tank Engine book repeatedly. The book, Thomas-saurus Rex is even worse than it sounds, but it was so nice to have a sweet cuddly boy to read to while my brains melted out of my head I was content to read it over and over again. Sam looked up at me and said, “Mama happy. Mama loves Sam.” I said, “That’s right, Sam. You make mama happy. I love you.” He said, “Love you too, mama,” and snuggled into my arms a bit farther. Then, at the top of his angry lungs he shouted, “Turn the page!”