“Shit.”
I got back up and trudged out of the bedroom. I made sure to sound extra huffy so that my wife would wake up and have sympathy and take over for me, but no. She was down like a gunshot victim. I was on my own. I grabbed the baby and tried to quickly change her diaper, only it took me ten minutes to align the snaps on her footies properly. Every time I thought I had it right, there was a stray unbuttoned snap right around her crotch. She began to fuss louder. There was a bottle of infant gas drops right by the changing table and I squirted an unknown amount into her mouth. I did this often. I don’t think the gas drops had any medicinal value at all. They were probably just powdered sugar mixed with water. But at least it was something. She spit out the drops and kept on crying. I grabbed a swaddling blanket and wrapped her up extra tight, as if I were putting her in a straitjacket. MWAHAHAHA. You’ll never escape from the clutches of this fluffy giraffe blanket now, I thought. She broke free in half a second.
There was a trace amount of formula left in the bottle. Now, formula allegedly goes bad after being out for an hour. At this point, I had no idea how long I’d been awake. Could have been forty minutes. Could have been nine days. But making new formula involved mixing, like, a whole new bottle.
I gave her the old formula.
She sucked it dry and began to close her eyes. Yes, yes, attagirl. Then, just as I heard that wonderful squeak of the empty bottle . . .
Thpppppppppppppp. Another poop.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
I put her back in the crib anyway to see if she would sleep, but the second I placed her on the mattress, she began to writhe and contort and make pained faces. I thought about propping her up on a Boppy—a curved breast-feeding pillow we had stashed in the closet. You aren’t supposed to do this. You’re supposed to leave a baby in a crib alone, with no other accoutrements around, because it can roll into things like pillows and suffocate. If I propped her up on a pillow, she might die. Then again, I was very, very tired.
I propped her up on a pillow.
She lay perfectly still there. So small. So beautiful. So silent. I loved her so very much, especially when she didn’t make any noise. When you have a baby, you’re always convinced that there’s some kind of magic bullet that will get the baby to eat and sleep and behave properly. OMG, all I had to do was put her on a pillow! Child: solved!
I closed the door and the baby began screaming instantly. I went back in and tried putting a pacifier in her mouth, but she was crying and shaking her head back and forth and her mouth became a moving target. There was audible evidence of a mouth present, but goddamn if I could find it. I took a finger and scoured her face in the dim light for a set of lips, then managed to sneak the pacifier in. She spit it right back out. Babies aren’t stupid. They know what you’re trying to pull. They don’t want you taking shortcuts.
I picked the girl up and changed her diaper again. She immediately threw up onto the changing pad, so now I had to engage in bodily fluid triage, trying to figure out if the shit should be wiped up first or the spit-up. I chose the shit, changing her diaper first and then giving her a new outfit. But she wouldn’t stop going nuts. Maybe she needed food. Maybe she needed to make up for the milk she’d just spit up. I know I always like eating right after vomiting.
“Do you want more to eat? Is that what you want?”
WAHHHHHHHHHH!
I got her more to eat.