Hurt feelings

It's taking me a while to adjust to this whole parenting thing, I think. I miss my alone time. Which is understandable; I used to have scads and scads of alone time. Time with AwesomeCloud doesn't count as alone time. He is very much a person, even if he doesn't talk and can't anticipate the basic physics of his environment.

Here is where many people gleefully cackle about how that's what being a parent is all about, hoo hahah, and I'd better get used to it. Gloat gloat, crow crow. Funny how people do that. In more objective terms, it's a rough transition and I can't possibly be expected to dive right into it with both feet running. (Not to mix metaphors or anything.) One helpful internet friend itemized my stress sources and then implored me not to feel guilty. That was nice of her, even if her list hit home rather hard as I read each very real stressor she listed.

She missed all the medical stressors, though. Hospitals are stressful. Pain suffered by your children is stressful. Hey, I spent two nights sleeping on a chair in a pediatric hospital (if you could call it 'sleeping', and I got to see my child be in pain every day since his surgery last Thursday.

In actuality he's doing great, all things considered. There are a lot of things to be considered. One is the fine balancing act of codeine. We don't want to give him too much, but too little causes him pain.

(I'm starting to think we're a little too paranoid about giving him too much. The MD warned us of parents who rely too heavily, too long, on the drugs, but I think those parents are dosing much more liberally than us. Maybe we can afford to relax about the "too much codeine" scare tactics and just give the poor kid some pain relief. He won't turn into a junkie. It's okay.)

Tonight the Cloud was a weird combination of cheerful and cranky. It was the pain. Of course it was. Maybe I was too quick to give him the Tylenol-without-codeine. Shortly after he had it, he began his usual pain behaviors. He won't sit up straight, although he will stand. He scrunches his legs up when lying down. (Yes, he does that anyway, but this is with more tension than playfulness.) When he cries, however, he makes no gestures toward the pain. He just cries.

So he was crying, and I was changing him, and he refused to sit up so I could take off his shirt. I took it off anyway. It was the end of the world. I announced then that I was done for the night and didn't want anything else to do with him. My husband, dismayed, scooped him up and trudged off to do something on the computer that was incompatible with a crying, needy baby.

My feelings were hurt. It happens. It's hard to guess completely right all the time what's going on in the kid's head. And I was tired. Craving some alone time.

I miss my cat. Time spent with the cat counts as alone time. I played with Melody for a while this evening, but I miss Trixie.

There you go, KJ! A little bit of negativity going on behind somebody else's happy rainbow blog. :)