Exit Strategy

You're looking at me like I'm some kind of idiot now, and I have to say, I am some kind of idiot, but just what kind remains to be seen.  Regarding this latest craptacular incident, I'd like to say a few things in my defense:

You're supposed to have your bum out in the open for a while, which we haven't done on the most regular basis, just like the Vitamin D drops and something else I'm still trying to remember.  But you crap and crap, and no one ever knows when it's coming, so open-air derriere time has been put on hold repeatedly.  Out of fear.  The same fear that makes me open your diaper with what I imagine to be the same consternation as a rookie bomb technician.  The same fear that makes me jump back uncontrollably screaming and knocking cans off the shelves with my head every time you fart with your diaper open and my hands anywhere near your pooper.  It's the fear of being covered in fresh shit.

But in another moment of (we find out later, less-than) genius, I elaborated a plan.  I placed you in the crib, on your tummy, with no diaper.  BUT!  I put a diaper changing pad under you.

The way this went down in my own mind, worst-case scenario, was something like this: you enjoyed tummy time with your cute little bum in the air, but you pooped.  Oooooohhhhhh, I said.  Somebody made a poopy, but it's ok because we thought ahead and we have this changing pad here!   I then whisked you away in a blur of clean, efficient, whiteness.  I picked you up and we smiled as I removed the diaper changing pad with smug and satisfied dexterity, neatly folding it, taking it to the washer, and dropping it in with a clean smile.   We smiled at our genius as we turned on the washing machine, tossing in a little soap and nodding to each other because we knew it would come out All Clean.  I set an All-Clean you down and put on another diaper, cooing in a montage of  smiles and sanitation and the glow of a job well done - revealing, I see in retrospect, that my fantasy was derived from a commercial for detergent. 

Yes, I know this now.  If you put a baby on his tummy and he poops, the poop does not magically dispense itself neatly in a little pile waiting to be whisked away in gleaming, fifties-era commercial brightness.  Unfettered by a diaper, poop oozes out onto the person it came from, and just sort of spreads.  And there it is.  For a brief moment, it's just a pretty yellow shmear, collected into an elegant pool and looking benign and meaningless, like so much modern art.  Transfixed, you stand there staring at all this yolky crap and the tiny human squirming in it.  You think things like: this could be a commentary on post-modernist capitalistic Marxism.   But a stray thought begins to flicker away in your mind.  It takes form with every little jerk of tiny human legs and hands, each of them flinging a little drop of poop hither and fro.   The yellow begins to slide around, become jagged and multiply, to stink and to be sticky and you realize you will have to touch it.  As it spreads, the little thought forms a mouth and starts to speak to you.  You have no exit strategy, it says.  You are, it tells you, IN. THE. SHIT.

Because removing said tiny human squirming in yellow poop cannot be done the way you would normally pick up something covered in shit.  You can't just grab a corner of it and hold it at arms length while you go running for a trash can.  Nor can you scoop a baby up in a plastic bag and throw it away.  It began to dawn on me, as I looked at you, that I had to pick you up, and you were covered in poop, and then I had to somehow get the poopy things separated from the non-poopy things, so that eventually, everything was non-poopy.  It's a logical quagmire, though - like moving those frogs on a log - everything poopy makes everything else poopy, ad nauseum.  All of this had to be sorted out to the tune of your 100 decibel screaming, which interferes with my spatial and logical reasoning, as I think I may have mentioned on more than one occasion and which you continue to disregard.

So what happened?  I made some bad decisions.  Mistakes were made, and the following casualties were covered in shit: all of you, my arm, my face, my shirt, the plastic bars of the crib, 3 blankets, one bolster pillow, the baby swing, 2 receiving blankets, and of course, the diaper changing pad.  Ironically, the changing pad, the original and intended destination of the poop, sustained moderate but unimpressive damage. 

Not done.  We then moved it to the laundry room, where we covered a few other things in shit.  The dryer, the other diaper changing pad, three clean diapers, some clean laundry.  We're still finding things back there with little flecks of shit on them.  Thanks to your endless flailing, it really does look as though someone threw your actual shit into an actual fan.   

And so, Mr. Baby, in the immortal but oft-disregarded words of Colin Powell, which I think apply to adventures in baby poop almost as much, if not more, than to military action: Have a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement.  And do not (and Colin Powell never said this, although perhaps if he had....) base your exit strategy upon the dreamy remembrances of fabric softener commercials.

Back to sleep

Dear Mr. Baby:
   
I think maybe we need to discuss why I keep doing this to you.  You hate it, and I hear you cluckin' big chicken.  You've made your point, even if all that you making a point can consist of is some really hideous squawking.  You sound like a thousand dying peacocks.   I. get. it.  You don't like sleeping on your back.  You don't really even like being placed on your back, unless it's on the dryer, and I think the only reason you really like that is because you get your poopy pants changed there and you can, occasionally, stick your feet in your own poop if you play your cards right.  Also, you're mesmerized by a geographically incorrect cartoon picture of the world.   But I digress.  You hate your back, and that's a big bummer, because as of 1993 they've got this thing called Back To Sleep.  I won't bore you with the details, it just boils down to this: basically, I can't put you on your tummy without being convinced that you're going to die. There are posters and brochures, it's on the Internet.  It is for real.

What's that?  Oh, all the children from before 1993?  I think they're just lucky to be alive.

What's that?  Oh I know what I say, I know what I say about the validity of studies and statistics and all that shit, but the Internet propaganda and the twisted, macabre posters at the hospital with quasi-statistics on them and pictures of babies who are about to die have me freaked right the hell out.  I would be a Bad Mother for putting you on your tummy, and you will die.  Just like if you look at plastic or don't breastfeed or I give you a pacifier or your toys are made in Bangladesh.

What?  Oh the car seat. That again.  Yeah, well, I mean....we have to draw the line somewhere.  Because really?  Expired?  It's not a goddam carton of milk.  Also, we're Americans in Canada, and we live on the edge.

You're right, Mr. Baby.  I am picking and choosing here.  You might as well get used to it.  The point is this: we can't put you on your tummy to sleep. It has to be your back.  I've tried putting you on your side but you sleep like you're playing badminton to the death and whack yourself repeatedly awake in your big, oversize head.  Oh, I know, I can I Ruth Goldberg all the pillows and blankets in the house so that you're squashed in there just so, and then we all just stand back and look at it the way you do after you had too many martinis and got a little brave playing Jenga. It won't last. You can't even imagine why you tried. That is stressful, Mr. Baby.  Not to mention annoying.  You'll know what I mean when you're old enough to play Jenga. Or diffuse a bomb.  So Back To Sleep it is. 

Yes, it should be called Back to Screaming.  It really should.

Axis of Noise

You and the dog seem to have formed some sort of partnership, or alliance, with designs on actually causing my head to explode from the incessant, loud, inanity.  Either that or you're just both fucking crazy.  To quote:

D: rrrrrrrrrrrrr
MB: ah ah
D: rrrrrrrr grrrrrrr
MB: ah ah ah ooooo
D: rrRRRRRRRRR?! rrrrrrrrRRRR!
MB: aaaaaaaaaHHHHHHHHHH.  AAAAAAHHHH
D: RRRRRR RUFF RUFF RUFF RUUFF
MB: AHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHYA AHHHHH!
D: RUFF RUFF RUFF RUFF RUFF RUFF RUFF!
MB: AHH AHHHA AHHH AHHHA AAYA AHAHAHAHAHAHA!
D: RUFF RUFF RUFF RUFF RUFF RUFF RUFF
MB: AHHH AHHH AHHH AHHHHA AHHHHA AHHHHH AHHHHA AH
D: RUFF RUFF RUFRUFRUFRUFRUFURF ARF ARF ARF ARF ARF RRRRRRRRAAAAAAFFFFF!
MB: AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH! AHHH AHYHH AHHHHH AHHHHHA HHHHHHAHAHHHAAA!!!!!
(Together): RRRRAAAAAAHHHHHHHH  RAHAAHAHAAHHHHHHFFFFFFAAAAARRRRRRRRR!

Gibberish?  Nonsense!  I have laboriously produced a translation, which I think is not only accurate but captures the delicate nuances of your exchanges:

D: What's going on over there?
MB: Oh nothing much.  I'm fine really.
D: Yeah, me too.  Just lookin' at the wall.
MB: Yep. I'm lookin' at my bugs.
D: What's that?  What the hell is that sound outside?!
MB: What's that?!  What the hell is this stripy bug?!
D: THAT!  THAT!  WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!
MB: WHAT THE FUCK ARE THESE BUGS DOING IN HERE?!!!!
D: THERE ARE FUCKING COWS OUTSIDE!
MB: THERE ARE FUCKING BUGS HANGING OVER MY HEAD!!!!!
D: COWS! COWS! COWS! COWS! COWS!
MB: BUGS! BUGS! BUGS! BUGS! BUGS!
D: I DON'T KNOW WHY I'M BARKING!
MB: I DON'T KNOW WHY I'M SCREAMING!
(Together):AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!  AAHHHHHH! OH, THE HUMANITY!  THE HUMANITY!!!!

Hairpology

Dear Mr. Baby:

I'm really sorry, and the more I think about it the worse I feel.

I don't know how it got into your bottle, and I'll be honest -  I noticed it after you had already been eating for a while, and so I figured there wasn't any point to freaking out and running around the house screaming, "The baby is eating a dog hair!'' Nor did I really feel like throwing all that milk out, because I don't know if I've told you how I feel about expressing breast milk.  It makes me wish I were a man.  Not for the obvious reason that I wouldn't have to express milk, but because then I could say things like, ''I'd rather slam my cock in a car door,'' if someone ever asked me what I thought of it.  And I figured you had probably ingested whatever was on the dog hair by then.  I spent a brief few seconds calculating (non-scientifically, non-statistically, and non-geometrically) the odds of a dog hair going through a bottle nipple and decided they were low.
 
However...you finished the bottle and the dog hair was gone.  Now, I do want to point something out here, which is that Fred is a black and white dog, so it's just our bad luck that we even know about this. Still, as usual I became a little bit worried, and then went completely psycho, and then looked on the Internet to make sure I really lost my shit.  Oddly, the Internet mostly tells you what to do if your dog eats baby hair, which either makes me feel better or worse as a mother, depending on how you look at it.  Anyway, of course I stumbled onto unrelated things, and what do you know Mr. Baby?  There's all this shit on the Internet about how if you're screaming for hours and nothing consoles you, it could be a hair wrapped around your penis.  So god only knows what a dog hair will do in your intestines.

Well, I got calmed down about that (I won't tell you how, but suffice it to say that Motherisk thinks I should wait 2 hours to feed you, rhymes with "odd car'' in Bostonian), and then I looked out the window at our dog, who was standing in the cow pen eating cow shit.  I can only assume that there's a 50% chance that some cow shit is on a hair from that dog, since he spends most of his time in there with the cows, who spend most of their time shitting.

You seem to be fine, and not any poopier than usual.  But I still feel pretty bad, so this is an apology.  I figure I could also twist this all around and claim that you might be better off for eating shitty dog hairs, since it seems that first-world babies aren't dirty enough, according to some of the Internet.  I don't know Mr. Baby.  The oracle is divided on this topic.

Anyway Mr. Baby...sorry about that.  Please don't get any poopier.  
Please.

Screaming

Dear Mr. Baby:

I was aware that pretty much every aspect of ''having'' you would entail The End of Fun, as Fun was previously defined (in broad strokes, it entailed martinis in bed, smoke rings, glittering dirt, and, vaguely, black faux leather lounge chairs in dingy foreign bars, getting up at noon, hanging lights, and beer).  I was given the impression that it would All Be Worthwhile in The End, and also Very Rewarding.  It's only been two months or so, but I think we should discuss some things now before it gets out of hand.  I've noticed a very large discrepancy between my own definitions of Worthwhile and Rewarding, and yours.  Let me give you some examples (just a few) to illustrate my point:

Things I Think Are Worthwhile: Sleeping in increments that can be measured in hours and after the sun has set, Quiet times, Sitting down while eating.

Things You Think Are Worthwhile: Sleeping in barely measurable increments and largely during the day and screaming a lot before and after, Screaming really loudly about nothing in particular during Quiet times, Crapping a lot and screaming about it

I think we could reach some sort of compromise.  If you want to poop 15 times a day, far be it for me to stop you, but maybe you could agree to take it down a notch with the screaming about the fact that food is passing from your mouth through your digestive tract and out the other end, just like, my dear friend, EVERY OTHER HUMAN ON EARTH?  If you want to scream about some stuff, like wanting food or having crap in your pants, I think that's unreasonable but acceptable...but perhaps you could consider NOT waking the buried dead of aboriginal peoples in Australia because the car has paused at a red light and disturbed whatever bizarre conceptualization of the universe you have going there in your gigantic, poofy throne of a carseat while on your way to doing absolutely nothing at all?  And if you want someone to pick you up, that's fine to yell about, but do you really have to keep screaming until this person is leaping around like a overweight, washed-out circus performer on crack?

I know you're about to pull that, I-didn't-ask-to-be-born crap out, but just put it back in your pocket buddy.  I'm not asking for eight hours of sleep in a row here, or even any free time.  No.  Those things, like Fun, are in the past and we won't see them again.  I'm just asking you please, meet me halfway, and sleep from 11pm-2am, and maybe don't screech like you need a fucking epidural about every single thing...maybe show some discretion, like, things you really need (to eat), versus things that would just be nice (like an eternally moving car).  And maybe just deal with a few things, like sometimes you have to wear a hat for twenty seconds and you may feel a little uncomfortably warm, and someone has to wash your neck because you smell like ricotta cheese, and bowel movements are just a part of life...stuff like that.  It's just the goddam racket Baby.  There's way too much of it.

Mr. Baby, you are indeed quite cute, and I suppose that I love you no matter what (and if I don't, society and Catholic guilt will make me think I do), but a lot of tremendously fun vices and components of my general sanity have been tossed into the ether to make way for you and you really don't seem to realize that I don't have the longest fuse this side of Athens.  So all I'm saying, and I'm not trying to start some big fight here - it's just in the name of communication- is that maybe you could, just every now and then, give it a fucking rest?