twotothree

The other day a friend said, “I laugh at the Christians who think that the Antichrist is coming.  Don’t they know I gave birth to him two months ago?”  She was referring to her reflux-y infant.  I feel this way sometimes at night, when Gloria is screaming for no apparent reason at two a.m.  I can handle the crying for food, or the crying for wanting comfort, or the crying for a soiled diaper.  But it’s torturously frustrating when she’s crying and crying for a reason that I just can’t fix.  USE YOUR WORDS.  TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT.  Thank God it doesn’t happen very often anymore, but sometimes she’s like a gremlin.  Only instead of food after midnight, her catalyst is darkness and the proximity of a sleep-deprived parent.

Thursday night was terrible.  Mike was working a double overnight and I was alone with The McFussy with the bonus of an early a.m. shift followed by a family dinner the next day.  I won’t go into the sordid details of that night, but it involved a playing, refusing-to-go-to-sleep baby from two a.m. to four-thirty a.m., and a nuclear diaper explosion at five a.m.  Oh, and a house alarm that wouldn’t stop beeping and saying, in a terrible female British accent, “Fire hazard or alarm tamper” every six minutes.  I called the customer service line and they wouldn’t shut it off because I didn’t know the password.  We’ll sum up that night with the following sentence fragments: Chinese Audio Torture.  Feces in my hair.

It’s amazing, though, what a parent will put up with.  Tonight I’m outside with Mike and Gloria.  It’s still light out and I’m stumbling around the driveway in Mike’s clown-like shoes (mine are inside), holding Gloria and watching the birds, the smell of baby vomit wafting off of my shoulder from her waterfall of puke two minutes ago.  I’m so tired that I can only manage to keep one eye open at a time.  But tonight is perfect and I’m giddy with happiness.