Small kids small problems / Big kids big problems

Don’t get me wrong, I love my son to the moon and back. But my posts are not all about rainbows and unicorns. I try to be more of an observer of how things really are behind the mirrors. My son is 3 and 5 months old and I feel like he is leveling up from a “very-small” to a “not-so-small” kid. There is a saying that stuck with me and feels like its representative of the way I see things lately:

Small kids small problems / Big kids big problems

And one of the bigger problems we have lately is that he has been unusually emotional. Crying because I bought a bag for groceries and he didn’t want that (probably because there was a time I didn’t buy a bag and it confused him as to why I do it now). Or because I asked him to wash both hands and he only wanted to wash one of them. Even the small things seem to trigger it.

It’s been a month with a lot of things happening. A month where we had the summer holiday. We went to Greece by car. Quite a long ride but he behaved like a champ. Mostly.

Once we got there, the hard part was convincing him to do stuff. It took a while to get him to play in the sand or get into the sea. But once he got into it it was hard to get him out of it.

He’s got so much energy once he starts doing things he likes. Before we got him to bed we would walk to the beach and the nearby park. He would start running and running into the night. Nothing wrong with that. Except there are so many things he could bump into or trip since it’s really hard to see in the dark. Make him stop if you dare. Or can.

Another big issue we (still) have with him is sleep. He doesn’t want to hear about it. But if he doesn’t have his regular sleep he turns into a ravaging zombie. There is a saying around here that goes something like this:

When kids are young it's hard for parents to sleep because kids don't want to fall asleep. When kids grow its hard to sleep because you worry about what they are doing.

I know some kids stop sleeping at noon around this age. We even had 2 consecutive days where we couldn’t get him to sleep. Those days I was the zombie.

On the good side, he spent 2 nights with his grandparents. His first nights without us. He seems to be handling separation quite well. We had a wedding and we were asked to be godparents. We tried taking him with us to other weddings but he won’t stay put for 1 minute. No way we could do that for 2 days and nights so we decided to leave him with his grandparents.

He seems to behave differently if he is at home just with me or my wife. And totally different when we’re all three. When he is with just one of us he’s a lot more cooperant and listens to us better. When it’s all of us it’s like he’s putting on a show for us and misbehaving. Does anyone out there have more insight into this?