It finally happened to me tonight. The crash. My sister-in-law has been gleefully predicting it, oh, since about the time I started staying home with Evan while my wife went back to work. I suppose I had to know it was coming too. But it finally hit me this evening like a bag of bricks once my wife got home from work a bit later than usual. She came home after I’d been sitting on the toilet for a few minutes (and believe me, I wouldn’t belabor you with that detail if it wasn’t important to the story), a few minutes during which Evan had started getting fussy (see, I told you). He was at a full-bore wail by the time she walked in the door, and I wasn’t exactly in a position to get up and fix the problem; she immediately went to get him and determined that he and I were suffering from exactly the same problem at the same time! 😆 Anyway, I told her that I hadn’t gotten any nap time in, at all, and had only gotten a couple of hours sleep on Sunday night due to assorted fussiness and a full-blast crying fit, so I needed to take a nap.
For the first time since Evan was born, I woke up exactly eight hours later. My wife has evidently taken Evan, Olivia and Oberon to the master bedroom and closed the door. I’m assuming that I’m in the doghouse now, since I didn’t stay awake to prepare a meal or do the other stuff I usually do in the evenings.
The last thing I remember is looking into the living room from the bed in the nursery – things are lined up such that I can look through two doorways and see what my wife is doing on the couch – because Evan started crying while trying to nurse. I asked her what the problem was, and she said “[Arkansas football coach] Houston Nutt just quit! Didn’t even stay for the bowl game!” Now, I know, and I know that I said out loud, that no son of mine would be upset over that, and she said I needed to come in there and watch the news. And that’s the last thing I remember. My head hit the pillow with a resounding thud and I woke up almost exactly eight hours later with only Othello for company.
The problem has been that my body clock hasn’t so much been “rewired” by the baby as “dropped into a bathtub while still plugged into the wall outlet and short-circuited”. I’m taking care of him on an average 18-20 hours a day, with Sundays and Tuesdays as my only break. Sundays are still “work my ass off on the farm” days, so let me tell you, that’s not much of a break. The rest of the time, if I’m not already wide awake, my body expects to be woken up at three-hour intervals by the high-pitched announcement that I need to mix up a bottle of yum for my little buddy’s tum. (Yes, it’s official. With almost no one-on-one contact with the outside world, I have, in fact, descended into BabySpeak.) My wife will take the baby to sleep with her a couple of times a week, but even then, I wake up three hours after “I’m doing this so you can catch up on your rest” begins, and I cannot get back to sleep. It’s not because I get up and get on the internet or play games or watch TV; I think it’s become blazingly obvious that my internet presence has diminished tremendously over the past few weeks, often because the three-hours-of-sleep-at-a-time thing doesn’t do much for my clarity of thought for writing purposes either.
It’s like having a battery that you charge to only 1/4 of its capacity, and then you take it off the charger and use it in your camera, phone, iPod, laptop, what have you. Sure, it gets stuff done for a little bit. But you have to put it back on the charger sooner rather than later, and eventually it can’t hold a charge at all. And that was me tonight.
Please don’t think that this is in any way a complaint on my part about looking after my son. I chose this. This territory that’s usually thought of as housewife stuff, I chose it. My wife and I discussed this beforehand, and of the available options, I chose this. I wouldn’t miss this time with him for the world. As tired and cranky as I am when he wakes me up for a feeding, I can forgive anything in the world for the smile on that baby boy’s face the first time he sees me holding a bottle. Sometimes he smiles if I show up without it in hand. He doesn’t just have a bottle of formula in his pocket – he’s happy to see me. If you haven’t experienced it, there’s no way for me to describe what seeing that smile does to you. If you have, you know what I’m talking about, and you’re already preparing to laugh at me when that smiling infant turns into a cynical, sullen teenager someday.
I just need to figure something out about recharging the battery.
Complete, strip-the-gears non-sequitur here: there’s an interesting article on CNN about the one guy at the Weather Channel who picks out their local forecast music. Man, I remember when they used to play some really interesting stuff, back in the late ’80s when you’d hear some Jarre or Terry Riley stuff on there. The first thought that occurred to me upon reading that article was that I should send this guy a sampling of my own music, of which there are more than a few laid-back tracks, but the thought that occurred to me next was that, now that he’s been name-checked on the internet, something tells me he’s going to be getting more than 80 free samplers per month now. 😆
Also, it’s come to my attention that some portions of theLogBook are generating a virus warning from Sophos. There is no virus here. What’s triggering that is a WordPress add-on script to prevent right-click-and-save plagiarism and image theft, which is a bit of a hot-button thing with me (as anyone who was around me a couple of years ago will attest). I’m looking for other solutions in that area, but for now, I will begin shutting down the anti-right-click script in most areas of the site. Phosphor Dot Fossils, Pixel Fiction and Toybox will likely still be affected, since according to my site stats reports, that’s where most of the hotlinking takes place. But there’s no virus in those sections either. C’mon, folks, I run a cleaner ship than that. 😉… Read more
