My baby the jerk

I've crossed some sort of parenting boundary this week. Not just the one where you leave the birthing suite with a baby with half your DNA thus making you technically a parent, but some invisible barrier beyond lovestruck parenting. You know what I'm talking about. The baby moon phase when you could never imagine your baby being capable of doing anything wrong. When your baby is an angel who poor dear only cries for a reason like teething/sick/hungry/in pain/tired.

Before I knew it I'd been telling people my baby had been teething for pretty much half his life. That's possible right?

Or is it more likely that my baby is just plain being a jerk?

This week my patience has all but run out with my child. He refuses to eat ANYTHING, sleep or do anything that might make life a bit easier for his mummy and daddy. He is totally breaking us. We spend the entire night servicing his night wakings his sleep latency worse with each week. We spend the days preparing and offering food like slaves to an unfeeling God who just laughs and throws it all over the place from his highchair throne. It's like he knows we could never bring ourselves to stop trying. We then spend the rest of the day cleaning up after him whilst my husband and I often at each other's throats being on edge from lack of sleep and battle fatigue.

I have become annoyed. And not just annoyed because of course I've felt annoyance and frustration in spades since he was born. But at some point between 3 and 5 am last night as he stared at me bug eyed refusing to sleep for hours instead squirming and headbutting me in the face repeatedly but yelling like no tomorrow every time I put him down...for the first time I was annoyed and angry AT HIM.

So there - I have crossed over into the parenting territory where you call your baby a jerk for being so damn hard and for effectively fucking with your life.

No longer can he do no wrong. Even his breath doesn't smell heavenly anymore it just smells of bad breath.

Then he wakes up in the morning completely oblivious to the hell we'd just been through to get him to go back to sleep. I actually tore an arm muscle holding him for so long last night.

I suppose I gotta keep him. He is pretty funny when he is awake the cheeky bugger. God I love that kid so much it actually hurts.

Does that make me a real parent now?