Help, ladies! I need an I don't know sanity check? Reality check? I'm at my wits' end and don't know what to do.
Rhys has been at nursery for three weeks now -- the first two weeks, when my mum was here, he just went for the mornings. Starting this week, he's been going 10-5.
He's still not napping more than 20 or 30 minutes while he's there, but I expected that. What I didn't expect was that for the past week, he has gone absolutely ballistic if he's not being held when he's at home. Every time I put him down, whether it's on his playmat, on the bed, in his cot, on the changing table, in his bouncy chair, wherever, he just starts sobbing and shaking. It doesn't matter if I'm two feet away peeling vegetables, he's still melting down. And god help us if I then walk away for a moment.
The longest I've let him go like that is 20 minutes (during which time I was never more than 10 feet away, and reassuring him verbally) -- he showed no signs of abating, and by the time I picked him up I had to change his vest because it was soaked through, he'd sweated so much.
Is this normal? Some sort of separation anxiety? I don't want to coddle him, but his reaction seems so extreme how do we handle it? At the moment, all semblance of normal life has stopped dinners don't get cooked, laundry doesn't get done...
(Doom and gloom, I know. But the bright side is that he loves his food! So far we've done carrots, bananas, sweet potatoes, potatoes, broccoli, parsnips, apples, pears and ground chicken, and he's gobbled everything up.)