Teething, mine mortal enemy

Another week has come and gone and Max is a different guy. Again. We last left off with Max sleeping well on the way back from Peterborough. What we didn't mention was that the sleep continued through the night once we shlepped him from car to crib. This November 16 sleep was the first one where we got a block of more than 3 hours since November 6. Now that I put it in writing, it doesn't seem like that long, but after 2 months of being spoiled with luxuriously long sleeps, it was enough to spawn the Patient Zero blog a little while ago. After a week of catching up, we're finally at a point where Mom 'n Dad are at >95%, although Max is something else right now.

It seems that some of his ear infection discomfort might have been compounded by teething pains. I had heard that kids tug their ears in both of these situations. However, Max never touched his ears over that feverish weekend. As it turns out, he started yanking on them about three days after we started hitting him with the antibiotics. And he got some cheeky redness...also indicative of teething. Hmm.


Check out those rosy cheeks!

This past weekend, he got quite irritable. Not constantly, but in great big bursts. He'd be having a good time, giggling and playing, and then all of a sudden, he'd start screeching and shaking his head. I'm really hoping that this behaviour is linked to the teething so that a) it will eventually go away and b) it lets me off the hook for yelling at him on Sunday morning. Well, not at him, but certainly yelling and he happened to be the nearest person, so we can probably make some educated guesses as to what he thought was going on...

One of Max's favourite games has always been to rush over to the tub upstairs and see what sort of bathing product containers are on the edge so that he can shove them into the tub. Sunday morning, I was getting out of the shower and he decided to come see me. Then he decided to take Mom's very full pumpkin muffin spice (seriously, where do they get names for these things) shower gel (all 2.5 lbs. of it) and shove it into the tub onto my baby toe. OUCH!OUCH!OUCH! Or, as I put it, AAARGRGRGRGHHHH!! Max was pretty distraught...kind of like the first time Mom freaked out from being chomped while breastfeeding.

Anyway, I'm a little glum, because since that episode, he's been a little strange around me and there's just no way to explain that when people feel intense pain, they say things loudly and that it's not always directed at somebody. But with all of the teething pain that we believe is affecting him these days (we're pretty sure - the rosy cheeks, the crotchety mood, the notable absence of new teeth over the last few months, the drooling...), his emotions are probably overlapping and it's tough to identify what is causing what reaction. All I know is that his new favourite action is a wild head shake while gruntshrieking and almost saying his first word (yes, that word just might be "no". How horrible is that?). Sigh. Please let us not be punished for having an easy baby by morphing him into ultra-tantrum child!

On the brighter side, we have some video evidence of some of Max's new tricks. We love our little guy and his many burgeoning talents!!