Oct
7
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.
Oct
5
I remember when Riley was just starting to talk, testing out variations on “ba” (“ba pa” was his first word, for the backpack carrier he rode around in, the same one we now use to carry his brother, sunriiiise, sunseeet), and JB and I marveled over the barely-comprehensible notion that someday he would probably be talking to us in that nonstop, breathless sort of little kid way, and we joked about how he would surely hit the stage of asking “why” because isn’t that what kids do, they say “why” a lot, right?
Well, and here we are, a blink of the eye later, with a boy who often talks so much he trips over his own words and holy jesus with the WHYs. Why this, why that, why why why why why why WHY, Mommy? And sometimes I am patient and dish out endless explanations (“Because that’s how traffic lights work; see how this one’s red and that means we have to stop, but those people have a green light and that means they can go, and . . . “) and sometimes I make up weird shit to entertain myself (“Because all of the lights are controlled by a tiny invisible elephant, and his name is Frank. Make sure you wave to Frank so he turns our light green!”) and sometimes if the whys have piled on each other, over and over and over again, and I find myself trapped in some spiraling vortex of verbal madness (a la the last 2 minutes of this brilliant and pants-shittingly hilarious [NSFW] Louis C.K. routine), then I use the gold standard in parenting fall-backs, “Because I said so”, which is of course what you say when you can’t say “CLOSE YOUR GODDAMNED WHY-HOLE BEFORE I GORILLA GLUE IT SHUT, SWEETIE.”
The whys can be tiring but he is an awful lot of fun these days, talking with me like some sort of person and all. We’ve moved past the truly bizarre Martian conversations we had when he was two, and now he’ll casually say things like, “Hey, Mommy! How was your day at work?” Of course, he also likes to randomly grab one of his buttcheeks while yelling “Banana muffins!”, but that one can be blamed entirely on JB.
In the meantime, Dylan is doing a lot of elated roaring. Seriously: he roars these enormous “EERRAAAARR!” noises and it’s kind of crazy. I took him with me to Old Navy today while I poked around and he was greatly entertained but also gripped by the desire to roar nonstop. It was a little embarrassing but also sort of hilarious, how I’d wheel him up to some rack of cheap shirts and he’d take a look and shoot his arms and legs straight out in excitement and ERRRAAARR at them, like he was just blown away by the fact that they were two for $14.
OMG RIB-KNIT CARDIGANS 2 for 1.
In other news, I’m working on a project that has to do with fitness and health and I’m looking for stories from people who wouldn’t mind publicly sharing their successes, tips, challenges, goals, and so on. If you’d be interested in contributing, drop me an email, okay? I’d love to hear from you.
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