Bad Dad V

All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

~nursery rhyme

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Our little boy, as I mentioned recently, was up nights over Christmas with croup.  When he coughs loud enough, he then wakes up the dog in her kennel and she joins in with a maddeningly harmonic counterpoint.  The choice then is either to let her out of her kennel in the middle of the night or go bat-shit crazy.  (My wife and I have already gone fairly nuts, but we let her out anyway.  The dog, not my wife.  Not to infer that she's kept in a kennel.  But I digress...)

After the worst of Declan's croup had waged its war on his esophagus, he finally reached the point where we could hear the phlegm loosening in his throat with each cough.  Before becoming a parent I would never have expected one day to be cheering on a toddler to cough up some grimy goo.  But there are a lot of things I've done and am doing that I never would have expected before 4th May 2004.  And it's early in the game yet...

Though over the worst of his cough, he was still wont to wake up late in the night or early in the morning.  Amy and I have surmised this is mostly due to a disruption in his schedule over the holidays.  He's a real little Daddy's boy (yay me!), and having me home full time for two weeks had been odd for him.

Just before new year's, he was up before five in the morning.  Amy took the consolation lead and then I tagged in after about half an hour of rocking still had him wide-eyed and eschewing somnolence on his mother's shoulder.

He and I retreated to the living room sofa, where nowadays we don't put much thought into the composition of the various marks and stains that comprise an alarmingly large surface area of the furniture.  If you put your head down on the arm and feel something scratchy, well then, move your head to a less scratchy part of the sofa and don't worry your pretty little noggin about it.  Dogs and toddler, you know.

After some time on the sofa, it turned out that Declan, much like Dr. Evil at the thought of the death of Mini Me in Austin Powers, The Spy Who Shagged Me, was completely inconsolable.  Feeling certain levels of frustration rise, I told my darling wife that I was going to put him back in his crib and let him cry it out for a while.  She went back to bed and I mentally marked the time on the clock to go grab the boy if he was still whining after about 15 minutes.

Sitting in the dark with the dogs, watching the clock and listening to my son cry in his room across the hall created a very strange feeling.  I wanted to sleep; wanted to get up; wanted silence; had to pee; wanted to turn on the TV; wanted to strangle something...

In lieu of all of that, I sat there in a half doze, blinking at the little digital numbers I could see on the VCR from across the room (I have very good eyesight) and listening to the increasingly plaintive wailing and gnashing of teeth from the other room.  (OK, he didn't actually gnash his teeth, but has developed the habit of grinding them, which sometimes makes my wife go bat-shit crazy.)

I could almost start to tune out the crying after it had developed into quite a predictable white noise cycle:

Waaaaahhh - hah - hah - hah - ahhhhhhhh!

WAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!

[Crib rails rattle]

[Sucking in great gasps of air for the next round]

Waaaaahhh - hah - hah - hah - ahhhhhhhh!

WAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!

[Crib rails ratt....

THUD!!

[Mentally to self]  OH SHIT!!

And to paraphrase Clement Clark Moore:
"I sprang from the couch to see what was the matter."

If you want to get a good sense of what 'clinging tenaciously' feels like, go and pick up the nearest baby who's just fallen out of his crib.  If that face sucker thingie from Aliens had had the sort of strength that was induced in my son after his traumatic tumble, Sigourney Weaver wouldn't have stood a chance and the series would have ended right there.  (Would that it did; the third and fourth movies were just riding the franchise coat-tails.)

So we two, my son and I, shared a personal space on the sofa for the remainder of the morning.  The strength in his arms inducing my own difficulty of breath; some sort of karmic remonstration for my apparent negligence.

Then, this Monday past, at 6.30 in the morning, after I'd left for my first day back to work, he did it again and Amy was left to, um, pick up the pieces.

Good thing his new bed is set up and ready for him to move in.  We're all out of king's horses and men.

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Previous bad dad posts:
Bad Dad
Bad Dad II
Bad Dad III
Bad Dad IV

Comments

[Paula]

Simon, cut yourself some slack. Declan isn't traumatized, instead he has just learned a wonderful cause and effect: falling out of the crib results in getting out of the room and lots of attention! Note the immediate repeat. Just make sure you pad the floor with blankets both by the crib and the bed (bed rails do help, but I'm not sure if they fit on palindromes).

[Mark]

I second Paula. A few months ago, Ben somehow got out of his crib, and I did't know it until I went to open his door (because the knob was jiggling as I approached it).

"Ben a bump a head," was all he said.

He has not climbed out of his crib since, but a toddler bed is waiting and ready to be assembled very soon.

[Sheryl]

My son is 3, and he has never climbed out of his crib, can you believe it? Me neither. It's got nothing to do with good/bad parenting; some are climbers and some ain't.

[Alec Lynch]

I'm with Paula, this is at most "unfortunate Dad." When I was younger I had no strength in my right leg, but, tragically being born without common sense, I would always start walking down the stairs right leg first, at which point gravity took over.

It got to the point where after the twelve tha-thumps my parents wouldn't even come to see if I was OK anymore, but would simply call out, await my groaning reply, and we would all continue on.