The Twilight Zone

I feel like I've been living in the twilight zone this week.  It appears as though both my sweet baby and my challenging toddler are tired of my generalizations and have decided to switch places, and now Dean is the one giving me a run for my money.  I'm not sure if he's going through a growth spurt or dealing with reflux all of a sudden, but this week has been hard.  He wants to eat nonstop and isn't happy unless he's being held -- although sometimes even that doesn't help.  I'm really hoping it's just a fluke, but it all seems strangely familiar and reminds me of when Jackson was a baby and had such bad reflux.

Thankfully Jackson had another wonderful week at school.  He brought home all sorts of art projects and drawings this week {and so begins...}, and he loved playing with the rice and beans that were in the sensory table this week.  When I picked him up on Tuesday, he told me that he ate them but then assured me that they were just "tertend" {a.k.a. pretend}.

What terrible twos?  This boy is sweet as sugar.

Thankfully Dean and I did have some sweet moments together though.

This time around, it's much easier to remind myself that everything is just a phase and will be over before I know it {much quicker than I'd like really}, but at the end of the each day this week, we were both pretty exhausted.

Yesterday, Jackson went to Mimi's house and had the time of his life swimming with "Jofes" {a.k.a. David Joseph}.

Meanwhile, Dean spent a lot of his day doing this.

His resemblance to the crab on his shirt is uncanny really.

He sleeps!  But only if I'm holding him or he's somehow touching me.

A quick trip to the grocery store for just the essentials.

It wasn't until I was watching him sleep last night that I realized why he wanted to do nothing but eat and eat and eat all day.  It's obviously because he was starving.

Obviously.

Today was the fall family picnic at Jackson's preschool.  It was supposed to be on the Capitol grounds, but because it had rained a little bit, we ended up spreading blankets out in Wesley Hall instead.  Thankfully, Ben was able to join us, too.  I had every intention of getting a family picture of us at the picnic, but between Dean's fussiness and Jackson's disinterest in eating, this is about all I ended up with.

And because I had already promised Jackson an ice cream cone on the way home, I then ran through the Chick-fil-A drive through with a baby screaming in the backseat.  In my defense though, he didn't start screaming until we were already in line and with no of getting out.

Today's nap location of choice.

Tonight, in an attempt to give my body a little bit of a break, I got out the baby bath chair to see if a soak in the warm water would keep him happy.  Jackson loved having him in there, and thankfully, Dean seemed to enjoy it, too.

Bedtime these days is a divide-and-conquer operation so while Ben and Jackson snuggled in bed, watched short films on his phone, and took pictures of Puppy and Hobbes "like Mommy takes pictures of Jackson and Baby Dean"...

...Baby Dean and I did some snuggling of our own.

All's well that ends well.  There's a light at the end of this tunnel, and I think we're going to be okay.