When babies encounter their first holiday, they must get confused. For Elijah’s first 4th of July, he mistakenly thought he had to dress up like a firecracker.
Let me back up. We’ve been trying to get the little man to sleep during the day. According to the books, when babies get too tired, they forget how to sleep and turn into the undead and try to eat your brain. By our calculations, he is already 500 hours short on sleep.
And wouldn’t you know, the 4th of July started with Eli skipping his morning nap. We thought he would catch up in the car ride out to Diana’s parents’ place in the western suburbs (insert laugh track). My calculations didn’t include his utter hatred of car rides.
So when we arrived, he was already irritated with us, with Grover, with the hot dogs, etc. Luckily, Diana’s dad has a trick to calm angry babies. He lays them on his stomach and pats their butts and whispers to them. I think he tells them the secret to making his patented bricks that decorate our sidewalk.
Anyhoo, that worked for an hour or so, at which point Eli decided enough was enough and went ballistic. The forecast was hyperventilation, with periods of screaming and contorting. His tiny, red-rimmed crazy eyes made him look like a meth addict. Diana and I took shifts rocking him while the other quickly crammed hot dogs and hamburgers.
He managed to calm down enough to go back to the grandpa butt pat. But I generally felt terrible for him. He hasn’t figured out how great sleep is. If Diana and I had our way, we’d never leave our bed we love sleep so much. We were going to start a company called Bed Inc. But we couldn’t figure out how to make money by sleeping.
The good news from home is Elijah actually slept today for a couple naps and is feeling much less insane.
p.s. If you look closely at today's picture, you can see my 15 chins.
No comments:
Post a Comment