Middle of the Night Mayhem

This is a story about how I was up at 5.45am changing sheets and pjs, though no one was sick, while simultaneously strangling my husband.

When one of the kids wakes up at night, and, yes, anytime before 7.30am is considered and treated like the middle of the night at my house, the standard procedure is milk, diaper change, back to sleep.

This is what happened last night: I’d been up with the girl from 4am to almost 5am, cause evolution is a bitch and decided to put babies through excruciating pain just so they can develop a full set of utensils necessary for their survival (i.e. teeth). So when the boy woke, probably annoyed at all the noise his sister had been making and wanting his share of the nighttime attention, I timidly turn to the husband (who, incidentally, is exempt from nighttime duty for a few more months due to the leukemia and all) and ask him to take care of it. Amazingly, he not only heard me but woke up and went to tend to the boy. Unfortunately, when they wake up it’s all “mama, mama” and last night he was all “mama, where you, need you” in a tragic voice, like mama doesn’t love him and went away. so up I got. The husband got the bottle ready and I started to change him. And this is when all hell broke loose.

Because, you see, men, they don’t have the same reaction times as women do when it comes to their offspring; sure, if he heard an intruder in the house my husband would probably be fully alert and halfway down the stairs armed with something heavy in 1.5 seconds, but when it comes to the kids…. that’s my department. So he goes to put the bottle in the boy’s mouth and almost drowns him in milk, because, you see, he had managed to get the water temperature right, put in the correct amount of formula, and mix it, he just forgot to screw on the bottle top. He did not screw on the bottle top. So the boy, sputters, catches his breath, and starts screaming bloody murder, I, on the other hand, had not a clue what was going on, cause we do all this in semi-darkness. Suffice it to say that the boy’s crying woke up the girl, so they were both screaming, the husband was still sleeping cause he couldn’t follow even the simplest instructions (for example, get me clean pjs), and that’s how I found myself changing sheets, pjs, and calming down a traumatized boy at 6am even though no one had vomited. Of course, once I got the boy calmed down, cleaned and back in bed, made a new bottle and then left the husband with strict orders not to move from his bedside until he fell asleep, I went over to the girl to calm her down cause at this point she was almost vomiting from all the screaming. And as I was rocking her and thinking of cruel and unusual punishments to apply to the husband, I remembered the image of the poor boy choking on a bottle full of milk in his face and just couldn’t help laughing… kind of how you laugh at people being woken up with bucketfuls of cold water on tv. I know, I’m a terrible mother.