Chomp!

Tavish is cutting his molars right now.

It's been two years since we last had to deal with this sort of family trauma, so I hope I can be forgiven for purging the memory from when Declan initiated us into the unwelcome territory of horrible night-time wails.  Tav's been real good at summoning those memories from the depths to which they'd sunk.  Makes me think of The Hunt for Red October, when they pretended to scuttle the big sub over the Laurentian Abyssal in the North Atlantic to make the supposed wreck irretrievable.

Would that my memories of the last bout of molar cutting were as far past salvage as that.  To paraphrase one of my favourite lines from that movie, "Most things in here don't respond well to shrieks."

It started a few weeks ago when Tav would uncharacteristically wake in the middle of the night, normally between one and three AM.  We'd sometimes cave in and bring him into bed with us to console the poor bugger, but our preferred modus operandi was to let him cry his broken soul into his stuffed ostrich and wait until the wracking sobs petered out and we all could go back to sleep.  It wouldn't do to get him accustomed to sleeping half the night with Mom and Dad.  That's bad mojo for the future.

We have, temporarily, given up on that endeavour.  My wife and I can tell when either of the boys needs consoling, and most nights Tavish was good enough to sob, moan and wail while still mostly somnolent.  Sometimes we would let him flail about for nearly an hour before he'd peter out, but BY GOD we won those face-offs!!  It was only when his night noises peaked into the range where we knew he was sitting up and calling us to rescue him from imminent death that we'd resign ourselves to defeat for the night.  (Only briefly pausing to consider visiting said death upon him ourselves.)

Our tactics the last week or so have a distinctive French flair to them, I'm sad to say.  Our Maginot Line has grown obsolete and the white flag factories are springing up like internet startups during the dot com boom of the '90s.  Tavish, these nights, proceeds directly to his banshee wails and dares us to ignore him for longer than five or 10 minutes.  It's normally my long-suffering wife who gets up to haul him into bed between us, but then we both suffer the heels to the kidneys at odd times in the night.

During the day he's still his jovial self, but can, at times, rapidly descend into bouts of incredibly annoying peevery.  The way he likes to sneak up and surprise any of the rest of the household with wet, painful bites to pieces of flesh does not endear the little guy to any of us.  Calls from Declan of, "Hey, Tavish bit me!" are not at all uncommon right now.

That kid was real cute when all he had were eight nice, white front teeth distributed evenly between his upper and lower gums.  Now that he has nubbly molars broken through, breaking through, and threatening to break through, we all have to watch our exposed bits of skin.  And catch up on sleep at a later date.

Comments

[Moksha Gren]

Ouch, poor guy...and poor Frasers. It's so difficult to know when to give in to the wailing. I tend to be the heartless one, Moonshot tends toward mercy. But then, we haven't met the molars just yet.

Nicely written post, Sir. I half expected photos of teeth marks on poor Dex.

[Tasha]

I'm sorry to hear about Tav and his teeth troubles. We were lucky with Ben. He didn't keep us up with that too many nights. Or we broke out the tylenol. e still have Sara sleeping with us half the night, because I'm too tired to nurse in the middle of the night.

Glad you posted. I was getting worried about you and your lack of internet activity.

[Simon]

Moksha, as you well know from your own experiences, what one intends and what actually happens during child-rearing are sometimes barely recognizable to each other. And sorry about not having any teeth-mark pics for you. The internet police would probably figure we'd been abusing the boy if we showed that.

tv, we've broken out the Tylenol and some teething drops as well. I think he starts wailing about the time they wear off. We just can't wait for him to hurry up and grow out of it so he can start annoying us with whatever he grows into next. I'll try to keep my posting frequency up, so as not to concern you too much any more... :)

[Mark]

Oh, don't worry, Tasha, he's been active on the Internet. Just not the nice, wholesome way you might like to imagine.

But I'm off-topic.

Nicely written, indeed, Simon. I'm sure letting Tav wail his head off is a less attractive prospect, too, when you have another little one in the house.

[marian]

If it's any consolation, my kid was past 2 before he slept through the night for the first time. File that away in the "it could be worse" folder.

Meanwhile, baby ibuprofen works better than tylenol for teething pain. And a little benedryl before bed won't hurt if you are desperate... I also used to try a few drops of scotch in 8 ounces of water, an old folk remedy, but I never noticed any difference from that unless I drank it myself.

[Hazel]

lol @ marian. I was going to suggest basically the same thing for ma and pa.

[Émilie B]

I'd brag about Xav's 12 shiny white teeth (8 front, 4 molars), but he's getting the canines out now, in addition to a cold, and he has his own little grumpy moments. I'll just wish Tav and yourselves for the biting to stay associated with teething, and not picked up as a habit, then.

Re: medicine : I was just informed yesterday that they're pulling out a lot of the baby/toddler medicine from the market, so before you give the younger kids something for pain, maybe check again with your pharmacist. I don't have much info right now, it might be less dramatic than it sounds, but it's worth checking out - Google would probably help.

[Psychfun]

Ok, I'm catching up on alerts & obviously have not been on your blog for sometime because I went Whoooaaa...who are those guys at that top?

Well, molars are good things to have...don't want to be on those mushy baby foods for too long...and man to think of all the great foods one would miss. :-) Good luck! Hope they are much better by now.