Suck On This - Part II

When Tyler wakes up in the wee hours between sunset and sunrise (you know the hours. Before parenthood, these would be the hours that you would just be stumbling towards bed, sometimes in a slightly inebriated stupor. These would be the hours that we now cherish as quiet, sleepy time), Sarah takes care of him nine times out of ten. It would be more accurate to say 99 times out of a hundred, but who's keeping track?

Sometimes, he needs nursies. Other times, he just wakes up and can't go back to sleep until someone picks his pacifier off the floor and gives it back to him. That cursed (please pronounce it "curs-ed", not "cursd", because that's how I'm saying it as I type it out) pacifier. When Tyler was born, I told EVERYONE that I would rather give Tyler a pacifier than have him be a thumbsucker. My reasoning? Well, because I can take away a pacifier. I can't take away Tyler's thumbs. If I could go back and talk to the Joe of seven months ago, I'd slap the white off my own face.

I never considered the flipside of such a scenario. When Tyler falls asleep, his pacifier falls out of his mouth, and ALWAYS drops off his crib to the floor. Upon waking up and realizing his pacifier is not within reach, he will gently call for his parents to come and rectify the situation. If we do not oblige within half a second, he cranks the volume up to 11 until we do so. Many a time have we walked into Tyler's room to see him reaching through the slats of his crib, looking at us as if to say "What? I tried getting it myself before asking for help."

Normally, this doesn't really bother me. Sure, it's a tad frustrating and a bit of a nuisance, but when I go up there to plug his mouth, it's usually between 3 or 5 in the afternoon. In the middle of the night, Sarah gets up and tends to him. When a couple sleep in the same bed, the wife will grow accustomed to the husband's alarm clock going off every morning. Eventually, she won't even hear it anymore. I can't exactly say that I don't hear Tyler yelling, but I hear it in a deep part of my head, and it takes a while to wake me.

Well, Monday morning, almost simultaneous to my alarm going off, Sarah cried out in pain next to me. We're both unsure of what exactly happened. She either pulled a muscle in her neck, pinched a nerve, or "something" that would cause severe pain to shoot down her neck and shoulders. Pain so intense that she was sure that she was going to vomit, and actually had to rush - well, as much as a person in that kind of pain can rush - downstairs to the bathroom. After a few moments, it was obvious that she was in no condition to care for Tyler. Feeding him and playing with him would already be quite a chore for her. Picking him up and moving him back to an area where we could keep an eye on him after he crawled into another room and started pounding on Delilah's crate would be quite another.

We managed to get through the day unscathed, with daddy at the caretaking helm. Sarah and Tyler have their daily routines, and I'm sure I did some things differently, but like I said, all came out fine. He's still got ten fingers and ten toes, and I'm still breathing, so we won't talk about the new bruise that is forming next to his right ear.

Tyler was definitely tired when we put him to bed. A few hours later, we heard him crying. I went up to his room to find him sitting upright, just crying. It was a comical sight, and I did laugh. As a matter of fact, I laughed again when I "drew the picture" for Sarah. It wasn't a big deal, because I hadn't gone to bed yet. I was simply hanging out, downstairs, watching TV or cruising the information superhighway, I can't remember which.

Later that night (*cough* one thirty in the morning *cough*), I found my dreams being infiltrated by a strange noise. It almost sounded like...

Screaming? Crying? Is that a baby crying?

"Gimme a break", I grumbled as I flung the covers off myself. Promptly, I discovered that our house is cold at night! I don't mean the cold where I need to put on a pair of socks. I'm talking about the cold where I should be wearing a snow suit, over three or four layers of pajamas and shirts, and have all that stuffed with those warm-packs that hunters take with them in sub-zero temperatures. We have one of those smart, energy efficient thermostats. At night, it drops down to 62ºf (17ºc) and I'm here to tell you that the piece of junk is defective. It was cold enough to make a polar bear migrate south. Sarah said that she had just finished breastfeeding Tyler, so he probably just needed his paci. That was fine with me, because I wanted to get under the snuggly covers again as quickly as possible.

"Of course he does", I thought, as I quickly walked as quietly as I could, or quietly walked as quickly as I could, "Why couldn't he just be a thumb sucker?"

I walked into his room to see him standing up in his crib, pacifier in mouth, crying. I kept thinking, "I have to be awake in four hours. I have to give a two hour presentation today. And he's crying just because he doesn't want to sleep?" *sigh*

I put him back to bed and tucked him in. After listening to him cry for another fifteen minutes, I went back in there to give him his paci that somehow managed to drop to the floor. I swear he must be pulling it out of his mouth and throwing it, just to get a rise out of us. He went to sleep for the rest of the night shortly after that.

Why is it that I get exactly what I wish for when it turns out to be exactly what I don't want. He shows no interest at all in his thumbs. I've changed my mind! I want him to give up the paci and discover his thumbs. I wonder if it would be acceptable to fashion a rubber band on the pacifier, so I could wrap it around his head to keep it in his mouth. Like a doctor's facemask.

Tyler makes me sick

Our boy (View More Photos)

I got home from Nashville on Wednesday night. On Thursday, Sarah tells me that she thinks Tyler is getting sick.

What?

On Tuesday, Sarah and Tyler went to spend the afternoon with Sarah's sister (Jiillian), Jilian's daughter (Lexi), and some friends of Jillian. A girls' night thing, apparently. Well, I guess Lexi, who's around 18 months old, was congested and moody. For whatever reason, they assumed she was teething, and not a carrier of the black plague, as I would have immediately deduced, had I been present at the time.

With a heavy tone of sarcasm, I can tell you that Friday was a LOT of fun. Tyler cried and cried and cried. And when he was done crying, he cried some more. We foolishly tried giving him a bottle. Tyler has been breastfed exclusively, save one night. Trying to give him a bottle while he is sick is a mistake that ONLY new parents can make. Well, we made that mistake. I had already, in previous days, had a couple issues where Tyler didn't want to be held or comforted by me. He wanted his mommy, and that was it. Although I know this isn't the case, I felt overcome with a sense of rejection. It had a profound affect on me. The sum of those instances along with Friday's drama left me very discouraged. It saddened me to the point that I had to give Tyler to Sarah and head upstairs to be alone for a few minutes. I fully understand that he's with Sarah everyday, and I shouldn't take it personally... but it's hard.

Tyler also decided that he had no desire to be in his bed that night. We didn't want to lie him flat anyway. We wanted to prop him up somehow so that he could breathe a little easier. I didn't see an easy way to do that at the time, so Sarah decided to just let him sleep in our bed. I wasn't planning on going to bed for another hour or so, so I opted to just sleep on the couch, because I didn't want to possibly wake Tyler when I came up.

I spent the next half an hour searching around on Google for sick babies. At 11:40p, I made a run up to Walmart to pick up some Vicks BabyRub. As I'm trying to navigate the many shelves and racks of medication, an announcement comes over the speaker system.

"The registers will shut down in 5 minutes. Please complete your purchases by then. The store will re-open at 12:05 am."

Excuse me? The sign on the front of the building CLEARLY states that they are open 24 hours a day. I've worked in retail before. It was a horrible experience, but it has afforded me the knowledge of how retail operations work. I assume that Walmart needs to poll their registers every night, and need to balance their tills. Luckily for me, an employee - that looked like she had absolutely no desire to be there - happened by. I asked for help, and she took me to the baby medicine section. I grabbed the Vicks BabyRub, and hightailed it to the registers.

I'm sure that our particular Walmart is just like most of the others out there, but let me set this up anyway. There are around 35 registers. Eight of them are the cursed "self checkout" registers that rarely work. My two major gripes with the self checkout registers at Walmart are as follows:

1) There is no limit on how many items you can bring through. On more than one occasion, I've seen people with carts that are absolutely overflowing with food and clothes trying to check themselves out.
2) It's always the people that DON'T know how to use the self checkout that end up using the self checkout. The one employee overlooking all of the self checkout registers seems to loathe their job more than the zombie-lady that helped me find the Vicks BabyRub, and has no intention of helping the person until they've been standing there, swiping the wrong barcode for at least 5 minutes.
3) I know I said I've got 2 gripes, but I've got to get this one in there too... I HATE the software that runs those systems. If you so much as breathe on the bagging area it starts barking commands at you to remove the last bagged item. You do so, and it just freezes and the stupid red light starts flashing - notifying the sole employee to actually take 3 or 4 steps over to you to help you. You know, effectively ruining their entire day.

But guess what??? Out of the 35 registers at Walmart, only 1 is open at 11:45pm. I am THE LAST PERSON in line, and I've only got one freaking item. When it's my turn to check out, the guy at the register tells me that he needs to shut down and that I'll need to wait 15 minutes before I can ring out.

I gave him the I-know-you're-joking-but-am-really-not-in-the-mood-for-it look, and quickly realized that he wasn't joking. I was in no mood whatsoever to get into a discussion with him about it so - as politely as I could - I said, "I've got a sick baby at home. Either you're going to sell this to me right now, or I'm walking out with it."

He looks over his shoulder to a lady that I never even saw. I assume she must have been his manager. She had a tone that made me think that she believed this cashier to be the dumbest man on the planet. She said, "Yes, ring him out." I can't do it justice in type, but she was less than pleased that he said I'd have to wait. Either that, or she played it off really well.

The Vicks BabyRub seemed to have made a world of difference. Unfortunately, I seem to have caught whatever it is that Tyler caught. My throat is all scratchy and sore right now. Chloraseptic spray isn't doing much good, but it never really does anyway. That crap only works for about 5 seconds, yet it's one of the first things I reach for when I get a sore throat.

And I feel so bad for Sarah, because I'm the biggest baby in the WORLD when I'm sick.