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Archives from 2002-2006

I saw this article today in The Morning News, and it reminded me of a post I wrote in 2006 detailing my experience attending an embalming (my brother-in-law is a funeral director). It’s one of my all-time favorite entries, and if you’d like to read it, it’s archived here. Be forewarned, it’s graphic, and may be unpleasant for some of you.

If you’d rather NOT read about such things, may I disturb you with something else? BEHOLD:

I think there’s such a thing as a fashion don’t, and then there’s THIS.

We’ve started putting Dylan in his crib instead of the beshitted, addictive swing at night, and things initially start out fine — he squawks more than usual when he first goes down, but eventually conks out and looks like an adorable little cocktail shrimp when viewed on the monitor — but then around midnight or so, just about the time when I put my book down, heave an exhausted jaw-breaking yawn, and reach over to turn out the bedside light, he wakes up and makes that ear-grinding noise most parents of young babies recognize: “EH-HEH. EH-HEH. EH-HEH. EHHHHHHHHHH.”

One of us goes in and gives him a bottle and gets him re-settled, but then he wakes up again at 1:30. And again at 3. And so on. He wakes up because he’s turned himself sideways and his head is mashed against the crib bars, or because he’s flopped onto his belly and has forgotten how to roll back over, or maybe because his feetie pajamas are filled with tiny invisible stinging jellyfish — I have no idea what all is going on but it’s like we’ve rewound time to the early weeks of parenthood, except now he’s much louder and capable of pooping entire cow-pats at a time.

When he was waking up from the swing, I could feed him once and put him right back down and he’d fall asleep almost instantly, but now when I put him in the crib during his wee-hour wakenings the first thing he does is lift both feet up in the air and crash them into the mattress: BAM! BAM! BAM! He arches his back and does that thrashing-salmon business while making a cat-trapped-in-a-vacuum-cleaner noise, all of which is meant to communicate the message that the crib? SUCKS A THOUSAND DICKS.

I bought a sleep positioner (a product which my friend Scott hilariously and accurately referred to as a “baby half pipe”) but he just rolls sideways on it and wetly gnaws one of the foam triangles, so that’s no good. I’ve considered swaddling him but I think it would just piss him off more, plus he’s kind of BIG now, I’d need like a sari wrap or an auxiliary roll of duct tape or something.

So I guess the lesson here is never let your baby get used to a temporary sleep situation, unless you don’t mind dealing with the colossal ass-pain of transitioning him away from it. At this point, I probably need to just dismantle the swing entirely so I’m not tempted to stuff him in it at 4 AM, which is, er, what I’ve done the last two nights in a row (JB admonishes me to let him cry, which I am 100% not opposed to doing in theory — for one thing, I know the different between a frantic cry and a pissed-off one — but it’s just so stressful to lie there in the dark listening to the noise and feeling that biochemical reaction of MUST RESPOND, and may I just point out that only ONE of us has to endure it, the other manages to snore openmouthed during even the loudest wails).

Well, this too shall pass, and in the meantime thank gods for Red Bull, SO SAY WE ALL.

Good thing he’s such a ridiculously cute chunk of pressed ham, or he’d be on the “baby+kids” section of Craigslist RIGHT NOW.

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