Again with the punchiness

Last night was even more sleepless than the night before, although no furniture was injured or hastily repaired. For lack of a better explanation, all I can figure is that my son once again woke up with teething pain but then worked himself into an endlessly self-perpetuating spiraling fury that he didn’t know how to get out of. (To be fair, he’s new at … everything, really.) His mother and I went through every palliative we could think of until finally coming to the Last Resort: the car. A looping, highway-speed car trip never fails to put the little guy back to sleep. Sometimes I think that is a little bit wonderful, since it’s practically an American institution, a part of the quintessential baby-having experience of white-picket-fenced suburbanites. It’s been a Last Resort for a couple of generations and now we’re a part of it. Yet somehow the commercial-ready imagery of the sleep-in-the-car trick always seems to take place at about 10:30 or 11 p.m., when the parents are just about ready to go to bed but have to get Junior or Princess to sleep first. Also, it’s always a pleasant spring or autumn night. It’s never late December with temperatures around 15 below and it’s never in the unholy middle of the night, the parents having been awakened from a few insufficient hours of slumber and subsequently having dealt with over an hour of random screaming and now staring at a clock reading 3:01 a.m. and desperate for a couple more hours of rest. So our experience deviates significantly from the late-nite drive-thru ad version. Last night my wife was the one who bravely threw on a few more layers and buckled in the little mite and herself for some hour-of-the-wolf cruising. She is my hero.


The loss of sleep may be yet another casualty of the move, with its attendant chaos compounding the aforementioned teething symptoms. Or it may not, and it’s not as though I can sit my son on my knee and look him in the eye and say “Are you feeling upset about the new environments at home and daycare? Is there anything you want to talk about?” (Or rather, I can do that, but if I expect any answer more cogent than “Shoes! Car!” I will be disappointed.) Fortunately if it has nothing to do with the move then this line of thought is irrelevant, and if there is a connection then it’s one of those things that will simply get better on its own with the passage of time. Or so I hope.

Overall the casualties list from the move (in terms of physical artifacts) is pretty short. A couple of plates got cracked into pieces. A notebook where I had been compiling all kinds of household information like account numbers and passwords and long-range to-do lists and whatnot got thrown away in the tempestuous Day Three of clearing out the townhouse. The thing we’re missing most (not counting basic cable, knowing how the local grocery store is laid out, etc.) is the bi-level plastic drying rack for the baby’s bottles and cups and tiny spoons and medicine droppers and such. It’s not that this particular item was damaged or destroyed in the move, it’s just that we can’t seem to find it. Granted, we haven’t completely unpacked every last box, so it may yet turn up, but if it does it’s going to be in a weirdly random place because we’ve opened and sorted through every box marked KITCHEN or BABY STUFF. Still, not being able to find it gives us plenty of cause to utter phrases like “Where’s my nipple rack?” which never fails to make us giggle. Probably because we’re sleep deprived, but ah well.