A Matter of Trust

Babies can be funny.  And by funny I suppose what I really mean is infuriating and unfathomable.  S is now 5 months old and we have tried to get him into a routine of sorts when it comes to bed time.  Usually we put N to bed first, followed immediately by S.  He plays with his big sister a little and then is taken away to be stripped and prepared for the final feed of the day.  This often includes a good amount of play time as he lies on his changing table, naked, and able to waggle his legs around as much as he likes.  Which is a lot of leg waggling.  I mentioned Ian Woan in an earlier blog, and it is times like this that I am able to see the likeness, when he has the freedom to throw his legs around exactly as he likes there’s a definite shape to his left leg that suggests he is just lining up to rifle a free-kick into the top corner of the net.  Or perhaps it’s just me.

He loves this, the whole thing, the playing, the waggling.  We have a giraffe called Sophie, let me introduce you, here's Sophie

Cheerful isn't she?  Probably because she doesn't realise she's about to be chewed by my son.

Probably a common sight for many of you, Sophie is, after all, quite the popular toy.  But no matter how many other homes she has infiltrated, S loves her.  Chewing, pulling, he hasn’t mastered the art of making her squeak, but if it wasn’t for that B and I would be pretty much redundant.  As it is we are marginalised enough as he plays and chuckles and grins away.

But then it changes.  As soon as we step in to get him into his pyjamas everything changes.  It’s not that he dislikes clothes.  In the mornings when you go through the same process and get him dressed he is as cheerful a chap as you could want.  It’s just at night, when you try to put his pyjamas on him he becomes a monster.  His wails pierce the night, every night and even when I explain to him that it’s not really appropriate at his age to go to bed without anything on he doesn’t calm down, it’s almost as though he doesn’t understand. 

B and I think we might understand though.  And it all seems to stem from the fact that S is the greediest young man I have ever known.  His problem, as evidenced by the fact that he is instantly silent as soon as it happens, is that he is worried about not being fed.  Despite the fact that every night the same thing happens, every night he plays, is dressed and then fed, and so far, every night he has been fed, neither B nor I have forgotten, he just seems distraught at the thought that today might be the day.  I suppose it’s good of him to make sure that we don’t forget, although it doesn’t feel much good when you are desperately wrestling to get an arm in as he screams in your face.  I’m not much good at the arms at the best of times, even when they are mostly in and he is helping you as much as he can (I still have trouble with N’s arms and she can practically do it all by herself now) but when he is throwing himself around trying to hurl himself off the changing table in an attempt to get to the food it doesn’t make for an easy situation, or a well-dressed baby. 

Perhaps all I really want to say is that I hope you learn to trust us little man.  We do care, we won’t forget to feed you and we just want you to be well looked after and comfortable.  So when we get to tomorrow night, and no doubt you will be angry at the thought of not being fed, I’ll try to understand, and we’ll just keep building that wall of trust one night at a time.