The deja vu we hoped would never come

I took this photo on Saturday morning, originally just because Liam is obsessed with juice boxes and when you give him one he drains the entire thing without ever coming up for air. But the photo has another story to tell: the rosy cheeks are back. Yes, we are back into the teething. Heaven help us.

I should have been tipped off late last week, when Liam started getting inexplicably grumpy, and when the rosy cheeks popped up, and when we started going through more diapers than usual. But it didn’t fully click for me until Sunday night. Liam went to bed as usual, then woke up crying around 1:30 a.m. and didn’t sound like he was going to get back to sleep anytime soon. I went in to see him and sat up with him for half an hour in the rocking chair. I thought he was good to go, but when I tried putting him down the tears started all over again.

So we got the bright idea (ha!) of bringing him to bed with us. The tears stopped, yes, but what ensued was 4 hours of Liam tossing and turning and patting Chad’s face and twirling my hair and talking to us and playing with the remote control he found under the covers and doing logrolls over top of Chad. Somewhere in there I think he fell asleep for a half hour stretch and I did too, but essentially we had a 1:30 a.m. wakeup call on Monday morning. By last night I thought I was going to die, and even though I hadn’t been planning to go to class anyway, that cemented it – no way was I fit to spend a late night driving!

He didn’t have a great day at Cindy’s, and he was crabby with us again last night. I was so excited to pick him up and take him home, because I’d picked up a little pair of slippers for him at lunch and was looking forward to showing him his new footwear; but the slippers just made him cry some more. Eventually we abandoned dinner halfway through making it, and changed him into his PJs extra early, and tried to make things as pleasant as possible for everyone involved. A dose of Tylenol before bed meant that everyone got a blessed full night's sleep last night.

I have read that getting the second year molars is a worse experience than getting the first set of molars, and I hope some of you experienced mothers out there can refute this for me. We had a bad enough time getting the first set. I surely don’t want to go through that (or worse) again – and not over the holidays to boot.