Forget the crib

As most of my readers know we have been trying to transition our baby K from bed to his own crib, however, with all the new issues with little Mr. AJ, we have postponed our transition of Baby K.

I will say this – Baby K is almost petrified of his crib, when he sees it, no matter the time of day, he shakes and crawls up me trying to get away from it as fast as he can. The crib is very close to our bed, so when I just sitting on the bed with him he can see it and almost touch it. I find this odd, my other two children of course didn’t like transitioning and would cry if placed in the crib and within just a few days up to a week of being consistent they did well. Never did either of my older children shake or want to get away as fast as possible from the crib, they were not showing any signs of being “afraid”.

I fear with our little man AJ not sleeping very well and being rather crazy and dangerous around the house, he is our first priority at bed time. We have to make sure AJ is not only starting to get to sleep earlier than 11:30pm but also make sure he is safe, because he is very destructive. AJ’s new thing is trying to push his sister’s TV off the desk it sits on. AJ has always been a bit high strung, but never this bad. It seems to be getting progressively worse as the days go by.

This saddens me, I see my little boy slowing falling apart. His eyes show signs of anger often, he just wants to jump around all the time like a crazy out of control boy. Time outs do not work in the normal corner type setting for him because he will toss everything off the counters, tables, etc. He will do ANYTHING to get out of that situation. Now, this is not a “normal” child reaction by any means, it’s way more extreme. My daughter never liked the corner and would often fight me and not want to stay in the corner, but we could “work with her” and eventually she would stay put. AJ is so much different, of course, he is not HER, but he is so out of control it’s hard to even implement the most normal consistencies you would with a child.

The pediatrician has now pretty much deemed that we are doing something wrong, that AJ needs a bed time routine and that we need to be consistent. My response to that is, “DUH”. If the pediatrician had listened to us in the office and TRULY HEARD US, then he would realize that AJ has had a very routine driven life, including bedtime routine. AJ has always been a child that thrives on a particular routine – one change and he has a melt down. He literally has to have everything the same everyday down to what sippy cup or cup you put milk, water, or juice in! YES this boy is VERY routine driven and expects things to remain the same, any slight change and BAM he is out of control OR having a complete melt down. This is a characteristic we always have known about AJ, so a routine is something we have always implemented with him.

Knock on wood … the past couple nights with a sippy of milk and placing AJ on the couch covered in a blankie – he will fall asleep FAST. We hate to give him milk before bed, because he had a cavity from this at 15 months of age. The cavity got better with routine dentist visits, but now with him fighting us tooth and nail on EVERYTHING – it’s hard to get his teeth brushed well, although we do all we can to get his teeth brushed – they are not getting brushed as well as they should I am sure, and with this adding milk to allow him to fall asleep – will only create more tooth decay problems!

Feeling stuck, not sure what to do, feeling like no one is really willing to teach us how to work with a hyperactive, out of control, almost angry child, we have decided to meet with behavioral health on Wednesday morning. Hopefully they will have more compassion and know what to do with AJ. We do not wish to place him on meds, we wish to be taught how to parent a child with such extreme hyperactivity and behavioral issues.

I can only hope that the meeting tomorrow will go well, if not we will keep plugging away and moving forward. We refuse, as parents, to simply give up and accept AJ will be uncontrollable – because you can control a child no matter the situation – it’s just a matter of figuring out what style works for him and how to implement it correctly.  I will keep you posted!