A little role reversal...

The ride back to the hotel was pretty uneventful and Colby fell asleep near the end. It was raining (again), so we decided Steve would slide out and try to keep him sleeping while I held the umbrella and then I'd run back and unload all of the luggage. Not so much. He woke up. I carried the 5 bags and Steve carried Colby and we retrieved our key from the front desk and headed up. That was pretty much the last sane moment of the day.


We got back to the room and I think the enormity of things hit Colby. He was in a strange place with strange people (little does he know that we're always strange!) and he needed to cry. And scream. And cry some more. And arch his back and kick and flail. I loaded him into my Moshi carrier and he calmed down a bit. Finally he gave in and laid his head on my chest and in that moment he was mine. I smelled his head and felt the warmth of his breath and he was my child.



The call back to reality came quickly when I decided to lay down with him on my chest because I knew he needed to sleep more. It was NOT a good idea in his opinion. He screamed and wailed some more. Eventually, he did give in and fall asleep on my chest. Unfortunately for me about an hour later I REALLY had to go to the bathroom and we shifted him over to Steve's chest with no problems. My hope was that we were seeing what we did with Kailin and that when he awoke from his nap the world wouldn't seem quite as horrible.


He woke peacefully enough, but took one look at us and his new reality came rushing back in and he resumed the screaming and wailing. We were able to get him to calm down enough that we could try to play with him a bit and we did get some smiles and giggles out of him (but we're still waiting for that all out belly laugh). It looks like his favorite hobbies include flinging things with glee and dumping things off the edges of other things.

Colby is a Daddy's boy. Through and through. He's 180 from his sister who was a "the mommy show" addict. Colby loves to be with Steve and wailed and wailed if Steve even went to the bathroom. I drew the line at "family bathroom time", though, and he had to cry those out in my arms. I'm okay with the role reversal, though, as I know he'll come around in time and I know that Steve is soaking it up.

Colby unplugged is Colby unglued. Unfortunately, the only pacifier we got with him is nearly chewed through and is definitely becoming a choking hazard, so we'll go out in search of new ones as soon as possible. I tried an american one to no avail.


We all hit the hay at about 8:30 and despite our efforts, Colby wouldn't sleep in the pack 'n play. His foster parents told us that he had his own crib at their house, but he was firmly and deeply entrenched in needing contact at all times. Kailin went through it too, so we thought we'd just let him sleep with us. Not good enough. He insisted on sleeping only ON Steve. Poor Steve had to sleep on his back on our one pillow (each) with a 25lb heat box on his chest while I had the rest of the bed to myself. Sometime in the night I woke up and looked over to see that Colby's legs were on the bed, but he was nearly sitting up with his torso on Steve's body. Steve said he'd tried to shift him off his chest and Colby scrambled back up as far as he could. By morning he was laying between us sleeping peacefully. He slept about 9 hours without waking which was far better than we thought we'd fare when we all went to bed (I was truly beat that early, but the real reason we went to bed is that we thought we were all going to be up all night given the length of time he screamed before he fell asleep.). We hoped that the morning would have Colby more accepting of his situation and of us.