Weekend Fun

I’m going to take a break from the backstory to write about the frontstory. This week-end was tough on our little friend, although he and Dimitri sat quietly for just long enough at the diner for daddy and Erin to wolf down a couple of plates of eggs. Nothing got broken and no one threw up. Success!

Anyway, Jackson developed a bit of a nasty, phlegmy cough and was in a very clingy mood for most of the week-end. You know, the kind of mood where your kid follows you around the house on hands and knees like a supplicant at Lourds, pausing when he catches up to you to grab your legs and wail as if you just repossessed his little red wagon. When Jack is in that kind of mood you can pretty much forget about doing anything other than carrying him around and looking at interesting things. Somehow I still managed to cook dinner and get grocery shopping done yesterday; but I have almost no recollection of doing so. The reason I have no recollection of doing so is because I got about three hours of sleep last night. In addition to Jack’s cough, he seems to have developed a touch of insomnia. As you parents know all too well, when your child has insomnia, you have insomnia. Poor Jack was thrashing around like a cat in a dryer for most of the night, pausing occasionally to sit bolt upright in bed and scream. Nothing says good morning like a loud blood curdling scream at 3:30AM. Scared the crap out of the cat too. My guess is whatever was causing Jack’s, uh, difficult mood, and his appetite to be off over the week-end (sore throat? constipation?) also made him very hungry in the middle of the night. Seeing as I’m not much of a baby-whisperer, not to mention that my thought processes are kind of slow in the middle of the night, it took me a while to figure out that the ticket to getting him to go back to sleep was a good old fashioned bottle full of formula. Did I mention that my oil burner is broken? It gets surprisingly cold in the house when the oil burner has been off for three days.

Walking downstairs in the dark in your underwear in the freezing cold to mix a bottle of formula at 4:30 in the morning really drives home the parenting experience in a visceral way, as does returning upstairs to find your son entangled in your sheet, trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey and completely immobile. By the time I got him calmed down, eating and eventually back to sleep, it was about 5:15. I fell back to sleep at about 5:45. The alarm rang at 6:15. Happy Monday!