Do you want to know how many teeth my 13m old has? 15! This is crazy! He has just one more cutting through and he will have all his teeth except is 2yo back molars. I don’t recall my other kids teething this fast, in fact, I am sure they didn’t, in fact, I don’t think any other kid has teethed this fast. 

I also said that Freddie will be walking by Christmas but I think I will be eating those words, he has been pushing his walker around lately but refuses to take one step. He is very confident standing on his own but doesn’t yet trust himself to do any other skills such as stepping. Aston, my first, walked at 1, Will, at 13months and I am guessing Freddie will take his first step at 14months.

Apart from those two things above, he really is the same old, same old. I kind of feel like I knew more of what to do with him and remembered more mama skills back when he was a tiny baby, but this age, I feel like I have forgotten all the ‘how many milk’ ‘when to sleep’ etc stuff, even if it was my third time around. It took me a little while to put away the Baby Breeza (formula machine) and just commit to giving him his cows milk (I give A2 MILK) and I was also still giving him four bottles a day and I quickly figured out that if I reduced this to one at bed time, he would eat better in the day, and he did.

I also stopped giving milk to him before his sleep so he wouldn’t associate sleep and milk, but now with him on just one bottle, I do it half an hour before bed. Sometimes, if he is hard to settle in the day, I am not opposed to giving him a bottle but I just know he will eat less that day.

So, Freddie had a stint of screaming for hours over night, early when he turned one. He would wake at either 9:30pm or 11pm and scream for around 3.5 hours, a painful scream and because he was cutting a billion teeth at once, I thought it was teething pain. I did have a home doctor come one night to check his ears and throat, and I was told, his ears were pink but not too bad- so it was teeth? This went on and on for two weeks and of course, I tried everything from rocking him, giving milk, panadol, bonjela, everything but nothing worked. My gut told me to get him checked again and that doctor said the same thing, but this time, he had a slight fever, then a big fever, so they told me it would be good to just cover him with antibiotics. 

Freddie improved with antibiotics and I put it down to, his ears might not be severely red or infected but for him thats enough to cause bad pain. This was the weekend I went away with my friends, if you recall. When I got home from my trip, he even slept through the night until 5am for three days straight, including the night we had our sleep consultant come (I will blog about this next time). Then, the day after she left, he had a severe fever (40) and I took him to another GP because I felt like someone new needed to see him. I told them the back story from the weeks gone by and that we stopped antibiotics on Tuesday. As it turned out, he had a pretty bad ear infection this time and the dosage of antibiotics he was on, was just enough to keep him at bay, but not cover it. He is on a higher dose now. He is still screaming and still sleeping in my bed and when he gets back to settling in the cot nicely, I will sleep train him.

Food wise, Freddie is eating a lot more, now that I cut back his milk, although he still prefers to ‘dine out’ and devours a pasta at a restaurant but not my dinners in his home high chair which is so annoying, I am not sure why this is! Good news is he is trying new flavours and being a little more adventurous. He now likes strawberries and watermelon, he likes stir fry and… potato gems! haha, whatever, I don’t mind him eating them every now and then.

I still haven’t been to the health nurse to having his length checked but he is an actual giant! People stop me on the street and tell me that he is long, yep, he is.

As for me, I have been a little anxious of late, just part of my motherhood journey, nothing new. I had a week of ‘something is wrong with me’ and spent the week in and out of the doctors/specialists, I went on got an MRI which was one of the worst days of my life (to check my ear canal and middle ear, or what I think… something worse) I cried that whole day. The next day, I spent time validating all the things going on in my life that I have on my plate and tried to think rationally about my health. If this was three years ago, there was no way I could have thought this straight, but for some reason, I was able to get back up and on top of things, I am so proud of myself for this and I am still yet to get my results, which may or may not send me into a mess again.

I do think that the boys being on school holidays will help me with this as there will be no pressure to wake up early and get them out the door, amongst everything else. I am hanging to get to the beach house, that’s for sure! I also deleted FB off my phone, its always so doom and gloom on there and I needed to detox from it, even though I am not active on it, as for instagram, I am all about being 100% authentic yet also not document everything I do, for example, if I am out for dinner or lunch, I make sure I don’t spend time on my phone, rather, take a photo or video if I want to and then store it to post later. I think we have been missing ‘in the moment’ moments for too long now and there is nothing worse than feeling the pressure to document everything.

Anyways, thats a pretty full on recap, I wasn’t going to share the anxiety stuff but I kind of hope that it makes someone else feel normal if they go through the same things.

Freddie literally just screamed his lungs out in the cot and he is now next to me in my bed sound asleep. I am giving him one more night to see an improvement with his night screaming (potentially because of his ear still) and if no improvement, I am going back to get him checked again to make sure the ear is looking better. Am I the only one who always thinks it would be a great idea to have basic doctor’s training and tools? If I had a otoscope (is that the tool to look in the ear?) and knew what I was looking at, that would be amazing! Mysteries would be solved!

Freddie’s routine

wake- he is waking at 4:30/5am which is actual hell, so I try and re-settle him any way possible, which included me putting the Wiggles on my phone this morning at 5:30am after giving up and then he fell asleep watching it and woke at 7:30am. I don’t suggest you do this, but I needed something that worked that could let me continue sleeping and him to sit still.

Breakfast at 7am- scrambled eggs and some fruit

Sleep- around 9:30/10 ideally in the cot

Wake and lunch

Second Sleep- hopefully in his cot and hopefully not too late, it usually three hours after wake.

Dinner- 5pm, bath, milk, bed