What is the Color of Hope?
If I were a wrestler, my patented move would be the baby sleeper hold, in which you pin the victim's arms to both sides of her body. Oh, and you carry the victim in your arms, sideways across your chest, tummy to chest. Oh, and the victim is a baby.
And by patented I mean it would work about 50 percent of the time. Which would probably not make for great television. "Hang on, hang on, let me try again, I swear this works!" says I, to the crowd, who are starting to boo, maybe. "Let me just flip her this way... and this, and here she is," as I present the now sitting up baby, facing outward, looking at the crowd with a sort of dull expression. If she's still not screaming, that is.
Because the ultimate goal of this hold is to get the baby to stop screaming. By this stage, I would have run through the possible culprits: hungry? No, she just ate, and my wife is now lying on the living room floor, a dried up husk, sucked dry by this little parasite. Gas? Well, she just burped, spewed a whole load of milk, which I have to try and hide from my desiccated wife, who would cry to think of any of her efforts wasted. She also loaded up a diaper so much it required a clothing change for not just her, but myself, as well, in an explosion that surely showed up on the United States' nuclear testing sensors. So if war is declared on North Korea any time soon you might at least point the powers that be in the direction of our house, to enquire after any further events like that one. Dirty? Well, as I said, she and I have both been changed. Bored? Well, I attempted to leave her down on the play mat to play it out for a little while with her duck. The look from my poor, now nearly two dimensional wife was enough to end that quick enough. So the only thing left on the list could be tiredness. And so, the sleeper hold. This hold is applied whilst running around the kitchen. A few notes on the improper and possibly dangerous technique I am using, here. 1) I'm in sock feet. This combined with the slate floors could result in my timely demise. Sorry, I meant untimely. What was I thinking? Screaming baby scant inches from my ear, apoplectic look on her face, directed at me... no, it would definitely be an untimely demise. Sure. 2) I've been carrying her for so long my back aches a little bit. This isn't really that dangerous, I just realized, after typing 2) that I didn't really have a 2), unless you counted being close to my wit's end with tiredness, being screamed at-ness, and physical exhaustion. Okay, again, maybe the last one is a little bit of an exaggeration.
Damnit. No. I forgot the surfer duck. Back on the play mat, honking a little duck dressed in swim trunks, stitched to a crinkly surfboard, she's quiet at last.
Peace, sweet peace. Until my hand cramps up from squeezing the little duck's horn.
disclaimer:
This is, believe it or not, an excerpt from the book (in serial form) The Man's Guide to Not Being Pregnant.
It's the back end of the book, so, in a way, we're reverting to our roots (ish) of being all hypertextual.
And I wasn't kidding about the exhaustion, so we'll end it there.
Thanks for playing.
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