Wearing us down

I'm sure glad Tom was home today. It was a long long day. Since we're giving Tobey food bland food in small increments, it felt like the day was chopped up into several 1 hour segments with us trying to find an activity to occupy a sick child until the next meal comes.

So the end of last week I said I'd rather have an energetic mischievous healthy child than a sick low-energy child. I still stand by that remark because the with the sick low-energy child comes worry that I just don't want to have long-term. But what happened by the end of today was a horrible horrible mix of a sick child with just enough energy to whine our ears off. That is a bad combination.

All day Tobey has had just enough energy to be able to ask about food...ALL DAY. In the morning I had sympathy but we could only respond with sympathy and an explanation that we need to take things slowly for him to get better. In fact, I think we were so sympathetic that we inadvertently created a whining, bossy monster, allowing some behaviors only because we felt bad that he was sick and miserable. By the evening we were actually giving timeouts if he asked one more time for food. That sounds harsh except there were times in the day where he showed that he could control his whininess and it became clear that he was just trying to boss us around.

After the biggest timeout, we said he can come out of timeout if he could stay quiet while we were on speakerphone with Dennis & Denise. So he did and he did great while we were on the phone. The second we hung up, his whining ramped up again. Clearly a controlled behavior even though I still had some sympathy for his hunger pangs.

Speaking of controlled behavior, what a difference it made to me with Tom home. When I was clenching my teeth not to yell at Tobey, I noticed it was 5:55PM. On a normal day, Tom would just be walking through the door with me ready to retreat to our room leaving him with a crying Eli and a whiny Tobey. But Tom was around to help today which gave me strength not to yell but instead give level headed explanations and timeouts.

We're on Tobey's bedtime snack and I can see the end of the evening coming. But I can't quite see the end of this sickness yet. I just hope that tomorrow when Tom's back at work that I can make it through the day alone again.