Dealing with clinginess...again.

Over the course of the past few weeks or so, Desmond has become unusually clingy with me.  He insists on being held by me as soon as I'm within his vicinity and he protests whenever he wants to go with Billy.  He knows exactly the right pitch and the right amount of volume to put into his whine to drive me crazy so that I can't ignore him when he's asking to be picked up (and as soon as I look down at him, with his pouty face and his hands opening and closing (his sign for want), my heart melts and I pick him up.  But boy, you better believe how fast those tears dry and how he starts reaching for something else the second I pick him up...there's no "Oh, thank you ever so much, Mommy, for picking me up!  I was absolutely dying down there without you!  Oh goodness, you are the best Mommy ever!")

We've tried to figure out what caused this shift in his character.  Before, he would be super content hanging around Billy or Grandma or Maria (our new nanny).  He would go to them willingly and happily, running to them with his arms outstretched and flinging himself onto them.

Right underneath the Arch. 

Look at how much he loves his dad in this picture.

This is something relatively new that Desmond's been doing.  He loves running up to us and grabbing our legs and then walking through them.  He's literally right at crotch height now so I've started to lift my leg up like a dog.  I think this is another one of those baby self-survival mechanisms that is intended to make even the most authoritarian, cold-hearted mother melt  when she feels her child grabbing on to her legs.

It seems as if he's gotten clingier ever since we got back home from visiting Salt Lake City.  We were gone for a week and when we got back, for about a day, Desmond wanted nothing to do with Billy.  It was really sad because Billy was so looking forward to seeing Des and had missed him so much (had even started to get misty-eyed when he and Des were videochatting).  But now, although he willingly goes to Billy, he still freaks out if I leave the room or if I don't pick him up when I'm around.  It's maddening.  We think his little head has been warped a bit by the change in constant other-caregivers...first we had to introduce him to our new nanny, then we went back to SLC and he spent loads of time with his grandmother and grandfather and he saw his old nanny, and now he's back to his dad and new nanny again.  Maybe he sees me as the one constant ("Penneh, yahr my constant..")  Hopefully, this will subside and he'll be the happy-go-lucky, go to any stranger that doesn't look like a drug addict or pedophile, laughing baby we all know and love.