We’re currently going through a delightful and exciting stage of development called “I’m 14 months old and I hate everything”. It main consists of Baby Evan hating things and making his hatred known in the loudest, screechiest, most ear-splitting way possible. Things Baby Evan currently hates include:

1. Diapers
2. Getting dressed
3. Being told not to hit people
4. Being told not to throw things
5. The floor
6. Sleep
7. The cat
8. Shoes
9. Hats
10. Sunscreen
11. Water, especially the river, especially people going swimming in the river
12. Children
13. Any food besides the one specific kind he wants at that exact moment but has no clear way of communicating what that one specific food is
14. The world “no”
15. EVERYTHING ELSE

I think I could deal (if not exactly patiently and lovingly) most of the time if we could get back to the happy place where Baby Evan sleeps 7pm-7am with one early morning feeding. I’m not even asking for him to sleep through the night. I just need him to get more than 8 hours – for EVERYONE’s sanity. For the last week we’ve done our normal bedtime routine at 7:30 or 8:00 pm and then fought a screaming child for close to an hour before giving up and letting him come back downstairs to empty the cabinets and torture the dog for another hour until the face-rubbing and whining reach epic proportions. We considered having him asleep by 9:30 on Sunday night a victory…only to have him wake up for the day at 4:45 am. Last night was another “victory” where he only whined for a few minutes before passing out and AGAIN was up at an ungodly hour.

E and I are understandably exhausted, not just from our own lack of sleep but from the mental strain of a crying, unhappy child we cannot seem to comfort. We spend hours every evening having the same discussions over and over: Do you think he’s teething? He must be teething. One year molars you know. Do you think he’s hungry? What else can we feed him? He must be too tired to sleep, poor thing. Should we just bring him downstairs? I know we don’t want to but what else can we do? It’s probably his teeth. I’m clinging to the hope that it’s just a phase, a temporary setback before he goes back to the good sleeper (relatively speaking) we’ve had for the last 6 months. Either that or I’m selling him to gypsies. Do they still take babies?

The only other possibility – although it sounds sort of crazy to me – is maybe he’s having nightmares or bad dreams or terrors. I don’t know if that’s the sort of developmental milestone a baby grows into around the 1 year mark and I have no idea what to do about it. What does a 14 month old even have nightmares about? A sudden peanut butter shortage? Losing his last sippy cup? The passage of federal legislation making shoes mandatory at all times? Whatever it might be, my only hope right now is to fill his life with so many happy thoughts and new experiences he forgets all about it. Maybe there’s a circus I can take him to. That sounds exciting. And also like a good place to find some gypsies.

This weekend has been like some sort of terrible research project into the nocturnal habits of juvenile humans when exposed to large amounts of sunlight, food and fun. Code Name: tire the crap out of the baby even though it doesn’t guarantee anything.

On Saturday we met our friends Brandon and Amanda and their daughter Madison down in Essex, CT (Motto: The Best Small Town in America)(My New Proposed Motto: Where To Go If You Want To Feel Really Bad About Your Economic Status). We took the kids to a rather child-inappropriate museum on the history of the Connecticut River and let Baby Evan do his best hobo impression, running in shoeless circles for an hour before we tracked down one of the most delicious fried clam po’ boys I’ve ever had at the Black Seal Restaurant. It was so good even Baby Evan liked it, chomping down part of the giant hoagie roll it came on, an adult-sized handful of clam strips, and dozens of french fries. Did I mention he also ate half the grilled cheese we ordered for him? (Our first time ever ordering off the kid’s menu! THAT is the kind of milestone they should put in baby books.) We didn’t get home until after 3, but by thanks to some crazy magical time warp he was perfectly happy to run around in more shoeless circles yelling at the dog until bedtime, when he collapsed in a heap of exhausted cuteness and slept for TWELVE. STRAIGHT. HOURS.

On Sunday we ran last minute errands (including letting Hobo Baby Evan run up and down the aisles at Stop & Shop – you guessed it – shoeless) before Brandon and Amanda and Madison came over and we all headed out for our first boat ride of the season. The weather was perfect, the traffic on the river was incredibly light and the kids behaved (at least for the first half of the day) especially after stuffing them with Goldfish and Twizzlers. We spent four hours enjoying our horrible financial decision boat and the sun and the water, with everyone but Baby Evan jumping in (water temp: 72 degrees) for some splashy fun.  After forcing one overly tired child into an afternoon nap, we went over to Brandon and Amanda’s (can you believe they weren’t tired of us yet?! What I am going to do when they move to Virginia???) for grilled chicken pineapple quesadillas and a few rounds of the marble game.* For dinner, Baby Evan ate several pieces of bread with goat cheese dip and some plain cheese quesadillas plus a whole sippy cup of watered down lemonade. Instead of the quite, easy bedtime we were expecting when we got home, E and I had to take turns rocking/patting/nursing one INCREDIBLY ANGRY SCREAMING CHILD for two hours before he would go to sleep and stay asleep. Eventually a dose of (generic, non-recalled) baby tylenol was what did the trick and Baby Evan slept from 11 pm to 6 am this morning. Which, well, just isn’t good enough anymore. He needs at least 10 hours of sleep to keep him from turning into a monster and in my fetus-growing state I need at least 8 hours.

WHAT THE HELL, BABY EVAN? What was the one factor on Saturday that led to a good night that we somehow missed on Sunday? French fries? No afternoon nap? Less sunshine? More hobo shoelessness? Is it teething? Diaper rash? A broken leg? Demon possession? Please tell me so I can solve the problem with food/shade/medicine/holy water and start getting those wonderful 12-hour nights on a regular basis. Sandy and I thank you.

* The marble game: best card/board game ever. Requires 4-6 people and a special wooden board, unless you are REALLY addicted in which case I’ve heard you can make a board with cardboard and little hole-punch circles. Sometimes called “Social Security” in Ohio, but the rules are less stupid complicated.

Like that title? I just made up a word, y’all.

Baby Evan has been experiencing a little bit of day/night reversal lately, but not in the usual way. Most of the time when babies get their days and nights confused it involves sleeping all day and very exhausted parents at night, especially during those first crazy, disorienting weeks right after you bring baby home. My child is doing just fine with his day-night sleeping patterns (besides the sudden and disappointing shortening of the ONE nap we have left to less than 2 hours most days) but his need-for-attention patterns are WHACKED.

Today at breastfeeding group Baby Evan flung himself into at least four different mamas’ laps, climbing over and pushing out of the way their own smaller babies. (He’s pretty much the infant version of Godzilla.) When one mom was foolish enough to pick him up after group he clung to her like she was the last empty lifeboat on the Titanic. While I was trying to make a pie this afternoon he literally hung on to my apron strings and pressed his face against the backs of my knees. His independent playtime has been cut from at least an  hour a day to just a few minutes at a time followed by much crying and whining and arm-raising until someone (me) lets him rub his nose on their shoulder and dig his sharp, grubby little finger nails into their arms.

And then bedtime comes and our sweet baby boy – who was once totally unable to sleep without at least 30 minutes of rocking and lullabies – thrashes out of our arms. He wants to be left ALOOOOOOOONE dammit, alone in the dark in his crib with his stuffed Yoda and his blankie. Mere minutes (and zero crying) after E sets a totally awake and active baby in his bed there is total silence from the nursery.The baby lays himself down. He pulls the blanket over himself, stuffs a corner in his mouth, and sleeps. It’s….mind boggling. As far as I know we haven’t trained him to put himself to sleep or encouraged it in any way. In fact, I’m a little sad he doesn’t want to rock before bed, since it’s the quietest, calmest part of the day and a baby cuddle is such a great way to relax.

I’ve started to wonder if affection works the same as food – maybe Baby Evan has a necessary daily allowance of love and if I meet all his needs before 7 pm he doesn’t have to fill up right before bed. Clearly his heart is bigger than his stomach.

Of course I know I’m tempting the mommy-blogger-gods AND Karma AND Fate AND probably a pack of rabid flying squirrels by writing about this on the internet, but I’m willing to risk it. Maybe my story will help some poor exhausted parent give their kid a chance to put himself to sleep and discover that’s what he wanted all along.

Most mornings, Baby Evan is awake before I am so after I get him from his room I let him play on the bath mat while I brush my teeth and rub yesterday’s mascara off my face so I can start my day looking less like something the cat dragged in (oh the irony of that expression in relation to my life). Tuesday morning I threw on some yoga pants and socks in preparation for a relaxing day at home before I scooped up my little monster and headed to the bathroom. Two seconds before I set him on the ground I noticed what I thought was some of the pink and gray yarn I had been winding and kicked it a little to clear a spot. As soon as my (thankfully sock-clad) toe touched the yarn, I realized it was not yarn at all but a DECAPITATED MOUSE CORPSE WITH IT’S ENTRAILS PULLED OUT AND SPREAD ALL OVER MY BATH MAT. Apparently, some poor little field mouse thought my house looked like a cozy place the spend these last few rainy days. Unfortunately for that mouse, my cats are excellent hunters.

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I need to interrupt myself right here to tell you a different story, a far more horrifying story in my opinion, to illustrate just how little chance that mouse had of surviving even one night in my house. I think I may have told this story before, although I mostly tell it when I’m drunk since it involves a lot of hand-flapping and shrieking, but I think you’ll get the picture in writing too.

After getting their first taste of blood hunting mice in the adorable but totally uninsulated cottage we rented our first year in Connecticut, Blushes and Rabbit are always on the lookout for opportunities to kill things. During my first month in the new house (E was stationed up in New Hampshire) I woke up one night to a weird chirping sound coming from chimney wall. I figured a bird had gotten stuck somehow and planned to investigate in the morning but totally forgot, the way you forget almost everything that happens in the middle of the night. The next night while I was sleeping, several things happened in quick succession. First I felt the cat jump up on the bed. Then I heard that weird chirping sound again. And THEN I felt disgusting, leathery wings beating against my face as the live bat my cat had somehow managed to catch tried desperately to escape. I had NO IDEA how it got inside, NO IDEA how my cat managed to catch it, and NO IDEA why she put it on my head. All I managed to do at that moment was cower under the covers and whimper, wondering if it was OK to call 911 for a bat attack. Eventually I took the whole comforter off the bed and – peeking out through a tiny hole – punched out a window screen. Then I used a broom to smack the bat until I stunned it enough to scoop it up with the dust pan and threw it out the window.  I slammed the window shut, ran out of the room and spent the rest of the night on the couch, trying to remember if bats traveled in packs or could lay eggs in your brain while you slept. I still have no idea how any of that happened, but I haven’t seen a bat  since so I’m hoping that one warned all his friends about the evil attack cats in residence.

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So I wasn’t really that shocked to find a dead mouse in my bathroom, although I can’t say it was the highlight of my day. I screamed and jumped and hid the baby’s face from the carnage until E picked it up with some tissue and threw it away. Once I got over the ew ew ew ew ewwwwwwww of having touched it with my foot I actually felt a little sorry for the poor mouse, since I know it’s death was neither fast nor painless. Rabbit, the eviler of the two cats, likes to chew off a mouse’s feet first, letting it try to hobble away before she kills it. And by kills it I mean “eats the head and leaves the rest as a little present, usually somewhere I will step on it barefoot”. So yes, I felt bad for the poor tortured mouse.

That is, until I found ANOTHER dead mouse on the bath mat this morning. Those little rodents are trying to invade my house. Get ’em kitties.

Since I’m still exclusively breastfeeding and Baby Evan is still being exclusively stubborn and exclusively refusing a bottle or solids of any kind, baby feeding is a one-woman show around here. When I’m not too exhausted to function, I remember breastfeeding is not going to last forever and we’re creating a special bond that I’m never going to regret. Before I became such a fan of nursing, one of the arguments I’ve heard against breastfeeding is that dads can start to feel left out of the nursing dyad and resent that bond between mama and baby. Although I don’t think there’s any danger of that happening around here (hellooooo no night feedings for Dad!), in the interest of shared parenting and giving E his own special baby bonding time, he is the exclusive manager of all baby bedtimes.

Besides a handful of nights where he was at work, E has done bath, pajamas and rocked Baby Evan to sleep every night for the last 10 months. He’s also home to do about 50% of the naps, although naps are in short supply around here lately. Since he’s had so much practice when it comes to sending the baby off to dream of a land made of boobs, puppies and small pieces of plastic to shove in his mouth, E is the expert. So the same way nursing is my baby go-to mode when the baby is upset, sleeping is E’s baby go-to mode. All the time.

Uh oh, Baby Evan fell on his face? NAP.

Oh dear, the baby’s grumpy because he’s teething. NAP.

If that child doesn’t stop screaming soon my ears are going to start bleeding. NAP.

Dirty Diaper? NAP.

Um, maybe someone should stop the baby from eating that. NAP.

The funny part is these naps have about a 70% success rate even when I didn’t really think the baby was tired. Unfortunately, when sleep ISN’T what the baby needed both Dad and baby end up frustrated and even more upset than when they started. It also means whenever I leave E in charge while I jump in the shower or head to the grocery store I come home to a sleeping baby – a sleeping baby who’s nap I wasted on stupid things like SHOWERS and GROCERY SHOPPING. Time I could have spent doing reckless things like leaving the dishwasher open for more than 30 seconds or sweeping the kitchen or trying to read a magazine without holding it up over my head. You know, getting REALLY WILD.

I suppose complaining that my husband is really good at putting our son to sleep is sort of like complaining my diamond shoes are too tight or this giant tiara is giving me a headache, but hey, we all have our problems.