Adrian is teething. He’s teething in the teethingest way I’ve ever seen or heard of a baby teething. He has four, four (emphasis mine, oh god) teeth coming in on top right now. It’s as though he realized his birthday was coming up and he was going to have to smile a toothy grin for all the pictures and so he just willed himself some dentition.
He’s not very happy about all these teeth. I’m not very happy about all these teeth.
Because when he wakes up at 5 am complaining about his new choppers dad gets to tell him to go the hell back to sleep. I mean, dad gets to soothe him back to gentle slumber, you know, like, with warm milk and a lullaby and definitely without any outbursts like “Jesus fucking Christ, kid, are you serious?”
Oh, get over your outrage. He’s a baby. He doesn’t understand bad words (like “Jesus”).
I brought him into the spare bed with me last night to see if he just wanted some company in his tragedy. Sure enough, he fell fast asleep.
You believe everything I say, don’t you?
No, that little clown decided that being in bed meant it was time for Playing, Yay!! And that it was time to claw daddy’s eyes out and pull his hair. For fun. For about an hour.
I knew I never should have taught him how to pretend to eat brains. He’s obsessed with it now. He looks me in the eye, grabs my hair with two hands, and forces my head down so he can plant his (formerly) toothless maw on the top of my head and then giggle. And then I giggle. But kinda tired-like.
Eventually I gave up and decided he needed distraction, and he could probably do with something in his stomach since he was trying to subsist on a diet of dad’s brains and they were a bit light for a growing boy’s diet. I made him a bottle, stuck him in his crib on a pillow, and stretched out on the now zombie baby-free spare bed.
However, I’m an old hand at giving kids drinks in bed, and if there’s one thing I know it’s that kids cannot be trusted with drinks in bed. They’ll hold it over their heads and slowly drip liquid on their eyes; they’ll flip a bottle upside down in the corner so its contents can slowly pool, and congeal, out of sight; or they’ll drop it in the dark and then forget where they put it until they want it again, and then they’ll let you know it. So, I tend to do a lot of checking when there’s a bottle or cup in bed. I hate doing laundry.
Keeping an eye on the Deadly Bottle of Liquid Deadliness (infant formula. from target. it’s $11 per can. DBLD for short. Although “DBLD” isn’t that much shorter than “formula” so I won’t be saving too many seconds of your life or mine by abbreviating) meant staying awake at least until Adrian was finished, or had dropped it, or had hurled it at me from across the room, whichever came first. So I cracked the laptop open, put the earbuds in, and surfed over to Netflix.
Why?
Because Netflix has every Joss Whedon show streaming now. Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, Dr. Horrible….and it’s not like Hulu where you’ll get teased with thirteen episodes from season 3 and then have to wait while they cycle through the rest. Nope, they’re all there (except for Season 2 of Dollhouse, which isn’t even out on DVD yet).
That’s worth $9 per month. Unless you already own the complete Buffy and Angel DVD sets, like I do. But then, maybe those DVD sets are all the way in the living room and you’d have to open the door to go get them and maybe that would wake the baby up and maybe your laptop’s DVD drive is just loud enough to be annoying. Stop judging my choices.
Anyway, half of a “What’s My Line, Pt. 1″ later (that’s Buffy, Season 2) I snaked the bottle from Adrian’s crib and aw’d at him as he slept on his stomach with his little butt up in the air. Then I put the earbuds back in and let Joss Whedon tell me a bedtime story about vampires and other vampires and a vampire slayer and another vampire slayer….and I fell asleep.
For about forty minutes.
Then Erin burst into the room at ungodly o’clock and climbed into bed with me and then climbed into Adrian’s crib with him, then climbed out, then went to the fridge and got some milk (because I left a cup in there for her the night before just in case this happened so I wouldn’t have to get out of bed. Look, I told you to stop judging my choices. It was better than the day she dragged an entire box of frozen waffles into the bedroom so I could get one for her.) And then we were all awake.
I don’t remember what I was talking about.
Oh, right. Teething.
So, Adrian is teething. I’m not sure I’m handling it well.