I am in the middle of my shift. Well, not really the middle since it's 10:00 and I'm on duty until 2:00. Baby Button seems to be working on a slightly different schedule than she has the last few nights. Previously, she's slept all day, until about 8:30 or 9:00, then she's been more or less awake until the end of my shift at 2:00 (and, of course, she falls right to sleep as soon as Libby starts her shift, allowing her to fall back to sleep on the couch, if she so chooses, though I'm SURE she'll try to give you some sob story about how she actually gets less sleep than I do and her shift is much tougher because she also gets to deal with Gabe when he wakes up at 5:00, but it's all balderdash, I assure you).
Tonight, however, she woke up about 6:00 and has been up and down ever since, until about a half hour ago, when she showed signs of going to sleep and then, miraculously, she DID (the first time she's done more than doze for me, in fact). What did it, I think, was the poop she had. I'm assuming it had to be glorious and more than a little exhausting. It certainly sounded, and felt, like it.
If you've never had the pleasure of a small creature shitting squarely in the palm of your hand, you're really missing something special. I don't mean special as in it was a "nice" thing, I mean that it was an event so far out of the realm of pleasant that it is almost certainly going to brand itself deep in my memories so that my brain can dredge it up as a very unpleasant interruption to my most engrossing dreams. I can see it now.
I'm in the middle of a giant industrial complex that is moonlighting as a top secret research and development department or, possibly, a unicorn breeding and harvesting facility (what can I say, my dreams tend to run the gamut of oddities--the only constant being that they tend to include people from high school or college that I feel guilty for never getting in contact with). Whoever happens to be behind whatever is going on is just about to do something that will inevitably affect me in some way--my dreams also tend to be painfully vague and I often end up waking myself up from them on the grounds that the plotline has become convoluted beyond repair and not even a Shyamalanian twist at the end could pretend to make sense of it all. But before all of this happens, some sexy lady starts directing her sexitude in my direction (this woman is almost always very vague, just a representation of "woman" unless--and this is the sadest part--the woman in question is Libby. Yes, we've been together just that long). She's all in my business and things are getting steamy.
Then she shits in my hand.
It will happen. Mark my word!
Anyway, I spent about an hour feeding Button three ounces of formula, because, at seven days old, human children are terrible eaters. Besides being terribly inefficient and slow, of that three ounces, probably 1 1/2 ended up dribbling out her mouth, down both cheeks, and forming puddles in the folds under her chin or behind her ears (which is exactly the reason why, after about 24 hours, she starts to smell like a wheel of cheese that's taken a shit--and the worst part is that we're not supposed to give her more than a spongebath until her umbilical "stump" [and that's actually very much what it looks like, a black, charred, disgusting little tree stump growing out of her stomach, it's entirely unsightly] falls off, so she's not really getting much better each time we bathe her). And then she shat.
Now, our baby girl may be as cute as a button, but she farts like a gorp fuelled lumberjack. And each fart usually contains an explosive blast of molten liquid waste that, if not for the confinement of the diaper and her sleeper (and under ideal conditions, of course--proper winds and the like), would surely squirt a broken stream of vile pooh matter ten feet from her posterior. Up to this point, I guess I had been lucky. I'd heard the farts, even felt them, to an extent, as I held her, but my hand had not been properly positioned to feel the full force. Until just a little while ago. Because of the way I was holding her, my left hand was tucked up under her butt and I felt the full force of the blast and the accompanying hot squirt of blech.
It was truly a moment to remember, for all the wrong reasons, and I'm just happy that I could share.
bwa ha ha ha
ReplyDelete