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Saturday 28 July 2012

Woman on the edge

Seth's headbanging is back again. It seems to coincide with his being tired and is obviously him not getting/doing something he wants. He can suddenly start doing it moments after being giggly and happy and he will continue to bang his head harder and harder until he is picked up. The other day I had put Seth to bed and he poo'd almost immediately. As I'm trying to potty train him I quickly scooped him up out of bed and put him onto the potty. Nothing was to hand so I had to lay him on the bathroom floor so I could get wipes and a nappy. As I left the room (I know, not having these essentials in the bathroom wasn't very smart!) Seth starts banging his head against the floor. It's carpeted and I'm trying not to positively reinforce the behaviour by always responding, and anyway I really needed to get a new nappy so I quickly dashed for what I needed and in the meantime he just kept banging harder and harder. By the time I reach him he's started sobbing but he won't stop banging his head. I can't pick him up because he still needs cleaning him up so I hold his head against the floor to try to stop him lifting it and, I tell you, for a child who doesn't have strong muscles to keep his head up, he certainly had plenty of strength straining against me.

I'm sobbing, too, by this point because he must be really hurting himself. I can't let go of him to clean him, and I can't pick him up so for several minutes we're stuck like this. What made it worse is that in between the sobs he began laughing. The sobs I can understand, but the laughter? In the end I manage to clean him up and scoop him into my arms where he continues to sob and laugh. I tuck him back in bed and it's all over; he falls asleep and Craig comes home to find me an exhausted wreck from an incident that lasted no more than 15 minutes. I felt like I was walking on a high wire and it was wobbling. Yet just 2 days later I'm okay again.

I have been filling every spare moment with decorating the house; we want to move to a bungalow and I decided that putting the house up for sale before we go on holiday (we are in America for 3 weeks - yeah!) was a great idea. So I have had 3-4 weeks to do all the stuff that we haven't done for the past several years. I do work best with a tight deadline but this really has been pretty ridiculous. However, the for sale sign goes up Monday and next Saturday we fly so I can hand over the house keys to an estate agent and we don't have to worry about it again. & now that the bulk of the work is behind me I feel like I've made it along that tightrope and I'm on solid ground again. Well mostly. 

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