zygote daddy

The Amazing Adventures of Brew Boy

So I feel kinda bad about this posting once a week thing I've been up to lately, but here's the thing: babies are hard. I realize that this may come off as complaining, but please don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. That would be suicide in such close proximity to the woman who does all the hard work. So me? Complaining? Never.

So back to what I was saying: babies are hard. More specifically, impatient 3-month-olds with short attention spans who weigh 20 lbs and cannot yet sit up are hard. Exhausting, really. Like, crazily so.

OK, wait. I'm going to abort this train of thought before I become completely insufferable. Let's think about something else. Like Brew Boy.

Yes, Brew Boy.

As was so colorfully chronicled in our little gentian violet episode some time ago, Chins has been battling a nasty case of thrush since he was a wee babe just a few days old. Now, after three months of treatment with various medications, I fear that through good old natural selection we have created a super strain of Candida sp. that is currently plotting to take over the world.

The latest treatment we are on, and the one that has actually shown some real progress, is good old acidophilus, a fungicidal bacterium that simply loves to kill off yeast. So now, with the daily yeast body count climbing higher and higher, Chins has exposed his inner superhero...

Brew Boy!

That's right, our little boy's gut is currently its own little brewery, one that produces smells oddly reminiscent of my grandfather's apartment, across the street from the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen.

And at night when we're all sealed up together in the bedroom? Let's just say that yeast smells don't always produce Rockwellian visions of bread rising in a quaintly nostalgic middle-American kitchen.

It is often very cute, but since he decided a few weeks ago that he no longer wants to be burped, all that dying yeast needs to work itself out...in other ways.

OK, I'm trying figure out a funny way of relating this, but as inherently funny as farting babies are, the poor little guy has to go through bouts of screaming in pain first. Not especially funny. Hearing your little defenseless baby cry in pain has got to be one of the worst feelings a parent can have.

And those tears? Baby tears? They simply should not be allowed. I feel crushed just thinking about it...

Ugh. Baby tears. What a way to end a post.

my self-narrated life

Chins turned 3 months old on Saturday. He's now at that awkward age between newbornhood and babyhood, where he's hyper-aware of the world around him but still rather amusingly uncoordinated with his hands. Actually, he's only recently shown the slightest interest in grabbing things at all (a little fleece blanket with shiny little loops of ribbon to chew on), but his obsession with all that is bright, shiny, moving, or otherwise AMAZING is insatiable.

Which means that whenever he is neither nursing nor sleeping he must be entertained. By either d.w. or me. Continually. I guess this is why God (or whoever) invented that baby TV channel.

But we try not to think of such temptations.

Anyway, long ago I ran out of new things to say to little Chins, and he gets rather bored with the same old repetitive, "Whose feet are these? Whose feet are these? Are they Chinsie's feet? Are they? Yes they are! Yes they are!"

Um...yeah.

Having had the last vestiges of a creative spark hammered out of us by a little man barely 2 feet tall, d.w. and I have now been reduced to simply offering a running narrative of activities in our quest for perpetual baby occupation:

"OK, now I'm emptying the dishwasher. Doesn't that sound like fun, little Chinsie? Let's see what we have in here...ooh, lots of shiny glasses! Let's put them away, shall we? These tall ones get stacked over on the right side of the shelf...there. OK, then these short little ones get stacked next to them. Can you see that? Can you? No, of course you can't...you're in your little bouncy seat. OK. Ooh, aren't those knives shiny?..."

And so on.

So when do babies start occupying themselves?

Sigh.

the trials and tribulations of a three-month-old

"Uh, Mama? I'm still not quite sure about this sitting up thing..."

 

"OK, OK...I think I'm getting the hang of it now..."

 

"Ah, screw it. Let's do something else. Tummy time? Yummy time."

wait — the French don't have a childhood obesity epidemic?

Spotted by Christian and Megan on a French grocery store shelf. Nothing like a heaping bowl of Choco Crack first thing in the morning, you know?

         

Must be because French children spend their time playing stick-and-hoop and chasing balloons around cobblestone streets...

a pariah in my own home

I have grown accustomed to being liked by people. I'm not talking about people basking in my radiant glory or anything (although were that the case no one would be turned away). I just mean that I like to think I'm a generally agreeable person, and I'm used to having my efforts reciprocated by others. And when people are dicks to me, I feel sufficiently justified in, you know, cursing the names of their ancestors and stuff.

Passive aggressive? Sure. Pathologically averse to confrontation? I'll give you that. But I must say I've been served well enough for most of my nearly 27 years.

Until now.

You see, Chins just doesn't seem to like me all that much. Sure, he tolerates me well enough, especially when I'm wiping yellow poop from his feet, elbows, back of the head, and wherever else babies manage to get it. And yeah, he smiles at me when I put him under his favorite mobile.

But to paraphrase the old song: anything I can do, Mama can do better.

I don't mean to say it's a competition for Chins' affection; that one was over before it started. All I mean is that when d.w. is at class for a couple of hours every evening, I'm left to tend to a baby who gets crankier every minute his mom isn't around, trying desperately to tread water until she returns.

I rock him. I bounce him. I sing to him. I even sit him in front of the mobile, under his little activity gym thing, and in front of the window to the street. No dice.

Then, just as his wails become ear-splitting, d.w. waltzes in through the front door, scoops up her now-cooing little boy in her arms and sits down to nurse him, milk flowing freely out the corners of his grinning mouth.

And off in a corner there I am, dazed, hair slightly askew, grateful for the newfound quiet but admittedly a little hurt seeing my wife and son cuddled together, gazing into each other's eyes and smiling sweetly.

Actually, now that I think about it, who could possibly think ill of that?