I’m sorry but I hate 9 month olds

[Lillylatte]

I know hate is a strong word. I consider myself to be maternal and I adore my boys. However, my baby is 9 months now and it’s hell. It was the same with my first son (now 4), exactly the same, last time it nearly broke me. With my first at some point everything let up, I even remember enjoying the terrible twos.
Hes not yet mobile but is desperate to be. He wants cuddles, then as soon as I pick him
up he wants to wiggle off. When I carry him he scratches me. He scratches me all the time. He’s the height and weight of a 2 year old. I’m in so much pain carrying him about. Like I say, not yet mobile. My first son crawled around 10 months I think. Then it’s the incessant moaning and no pay off… I can’t seem to make him happy. Fine if he communicates, we figure it out, yay I did something. But no. Never totally happy. But rarely totally sad either. Just constant demanding something or anything. He seems to be permenantly teething, so I don’t even feel like I can reassure myself that “it’s just a bad teething week”. He used to play independently beautifully and I was encouraging of that. Now he gets very quickly bored.
Help? Solidarity?
I am starting to dread and resent parenting again and will spend hours trying to escape mentally after a long day of it. I want to feel less dreadful.

Sending (virtual, sadly) tea and sympathy – there's definitely a tricky stage for a lot of babies when they are done being little babies but can't yet do older baby things, and oh, the frustration! We were all hugely relieved when DD2 finally started crawling, even DD1, whose toys were now fair game.

I found toys quite tricky at this stage as well, done with the baby rattles and sensory bits, but couldn't quite do the stacking, shape sorting, etc. toys for a young toddler. We got some decent mileage out of the Galt 4 pop-up people in a block, and someone gave us this https://www.amazon.co.uk/Baby-Einstein-Discover-Activity-Station/dp/B06Y1192MF – I think it helped that I could switch between animals/colours/music, and even switch languages. Oh, and I made some stacking 'rings' with bigger holes in the centre so they were easier to get over the post, and also smaller to hold. I think that might have been slightly older than 9 months for mine, but still in this tricky phase. Stacking cups too – more for putting one inside the other than stacking at this point, but it all counts.

Any activities he does like? Both of mine liked water, so long play baths just (or mostly) for fun, washing up pan full of water in the garden, plus actual swimming. Obviously you need to supervise, but I found I could get a break from constantly engaging, which at least took the edge off.

It's shit. There are only two months (so far) where I almost entirely hated parenting, and that was month 4 (sleep regression and furious overtiredness but wouldn't nap for more than 30m) and month 7.

The screaming, the teething, and at that point, lots of sickness during weaning.

Luckily he cracked it at 7 months and 2 days, but before that I was doing everything I could to get him over the line.