Saturday, July 15, 2006

papillon

Usually by the time Daniel wakes up from a sleep, he's escaped his swaddling and is lying flat on his face which, apart from the flat on his face component, isn't really an issue. The value of the swaddle is its ability to bring about the onset of sleep. Once sleep is aquired, the swaddle value plummets until the next time nap time rolls around, when the swaddle is once again king.

Now, if you're anywhere close to being my mother, yes I still swaddle him because a) it's legal and b) without swaddling him, I've got a snowflake's chance in hell of getting him to sleep. There is a point c) and it's that we swaddle because that's what we do.

I'm glad we cleared that up.

So about that snowflake's chance business. Dude escaped right in front of my eyes this morning, and then rolled over and crawled (crawled!!) out of bed until he lay half in and half out, and then he flopped about like a fish on a pier. So I wrapped him up tighter and he did it again. He was wide awake by now, what with all the games (ha ha HA) we were playing at naptime, so I threw in the towel in favor of pondering this latest dilemma.

He wouldn't go down for his nap this morning because babies are little creatures of habit, and the most important component of The Nap is not Daniel's tiredness, it's how effectively you can hold the little shit down. Without being pinned on his back with his arms by his side, Daniel believes that the tiredness factor can go fuck itself until it's mate, delirious, shows up to pah-tay. Which it did. Woot. The escaping the swaddle though, isn't the issue. Dude will eventually pass out from exhaustion anyway. It's the escaping the bed that's the issue. I mean, the bedroom doesn't come equipped qith sharp knives and unattended power tools, but still, letting a baby loose in there unsupervised? Not sucha great idea. You'd be all, it's quiet in there, junior must be napping so well. Meanwhile junior has climbed out the window, hot wired your car and is downtown in some sleazy bar shooting craps.

The boy is crawling and he's only just gone seven months old. True, it's not a very elegant form of locomotion, it being the mode of trasport one would more expect to see coming from whatever it was that first crawled out of the primoridal slime than a little boy, but that's not the point. The point is he's crawling, and while he's been mobile since he first instigated the cute as fuck rolling phase that's kept me on my feet since the first time he disappeared under the sofa, this is the first time he's been able to escape his bed.

He eventually went to sleep, but now that he's realised his potential as a bed escaper, my mission this afternoon is to find a cot before the close of trade at 5pm. The pity is that we went to Ikea yesterday, and came home with nothing that even resembles an infant's bed.

Oh my god people. How fucking awesome is Ikea? Because we're a hick town, despite being one of the nation's capitals, Ikea only opened here in April. It's taken me this long to get there because I don't know why. I wish I was more decisive though because I looked at a damn cot yesterday, a sniglar, and instead of buying the fucking thing, I pursed my lips, cupped my chin between my thumb and forefinger, looked at its blonde wood hues, and decided what I really wanted was a white cot with drop down sides because, you know, I'm rich. So I bought a dish rack and a document tray instead, because raising a child is all about owning shit like that.




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