Baby’s up for the eleventeenth time and life sucks
The assumption is that for her 14th monthaversary the final five teeth she was missing have decided to come in. Basing this on the horrible breath, drool, grabbing at her mouth and rubbing her face like it hurts.
We tried some hippie dippie tablets for teething pain earlier, washed that down with baby meds several hours later when it was evident the teething tablets did nothing for Maggie. It’s 1:37am and since eight pm there’s been a screaming bundle of hellish pain and rage I’ve been attempting to calm.
Somewhere around midnight I managed to get her down, set up the whole baby monitoring rig, and happened to be watching as she tossed and turned in her sleep and finally headbutted the crib hard enough to make a resounding thunk, send her pacifier to god knows where, and generally undo what I’d been working on for the past few hours.
At 14 months you do not swaddle, but with a half-asleep miserable baby struggling to calm down from pain and exhaustion I finally decided to do what worked several months back and rig up a baby burrito.
That worked to get her calmed down and somewhat alert. I found that I had to wake the baby up and get her to notice her surroundings in order to get her to calm down, and the fight to get to sleep and the pain and exhaustion are mighty big obstacles to baby peace and happiness.
I’m finding I’m not a particularly nice person when a baby’s been screaming directly at me for an hour, and I decidedly want to go and pick a fight with someone, but I also don’t feel like getting the crap beat out of me as I’ve got stuff to do and I don’t think I’d feel particularly great bloodied and bruised with a baby screaming at the top of her lungs.
After watching the last round of ridiculous circumstances that lead to Maggie waking up, there’s now a safety dolly on one side of the crib, and a no choke teddy bear on the other to keep her head from slapping into the sides.
I’ve tried going to sleep multiple times tonight, even turned the baby monitoring sound down low enough that it takes a sustained effort to bug me, but much like during the first eight months she’s absurdly loud and quite insistent that I listen to her complaints, even if she doesn’t want to be held, cuddled, or left to her own devices.
It’s the near 2am hours when I feel like I’ve lost it as a parent. I know I’ve got to be up in fewer hours than I need to sleep, that I’ve got to go and work and have something of a brain, I’ll return and feel like an ass if I take a nap with my happy baby wanting to play with me, and then I’ve got work to do again after all that’s done.
It’s an insane sadness at how bad my baby feels multiplied by how exhausted I know I’m going to feel taken to the factor of how annoyed I have gotten and then exponent it by the despair at some of the things that run through your mind when a baby’s screaming at you and you’ve got a blog post near 2am.
553 words later, the baby has rolled a couple of times and I’m going to slink back to bed, attempting for the eleventeenth time to get some rest and forget how absolutely horrible some old Superman/Doomsday comics I just reread were.
