Who needs sleep?

Sorry if I've been out of touch. I've been tired.

Andrew, my little mellow baby who is so sweet and calm, had become a terror and a force to be reckoned with. He now has the ability to sleep through the night. He sometimes goes to sleep and does not wake until 4am, at which point he goes back to sleep very quickly. But the past few days he has woken up every couple of hours crying. I go in, rock him back to sleep, and place him in his bed, and he usually remains sleeping long enough for me to set one sleepy foot in the doorway before crying out in outrage that I, his mother, have left him in his BED. ALONE. To SLEEP. He can cry for a long time. And he cries loudly and angrily.

During the daytime he cries whenever I put him down. To fix dinner. Or tie a shoe. Or use the bathroom. He cries and crawls after me, turning my frantic dashes back and forth across the kitchen to get the boys out the door in the morning into some odd combination of child neglect and obstacle course. He clings to my feet and my pants and pulls himself up, giving me the choice of either giving up what I was doing and staying still, or punting him across the room like a football.

I have had a lot of fun these past couple of days with my boys. We had shared funny moments and all that stuff. But these moments are just windows in endless days and nights of crying and trying to convince a nine - almost ten month old that he does not need to be in my arms 24 hours a day.