Here's something I wrote in the middle of the night @ 2 weeks after The Alex arrived:It’s exactly 2AM Tuesday, May 22, 2007 and I’m a little creeped out. It seems to me that I’ve found the twilight zone of baby silence.
About 15 minutes ago, Little Man woke up and started his usual “Feed me NOW!” cry. Mommy, of course needs to use the bathroom right at that moment (it’s only fair poor thing, she just woke up with a screaming Alex in her ear) and so I’m faced with keeping the kid happy for the next 5 minutes (which at this time of night can feel like those 300 years in between the Testaments when God was silent and the Macabees ran rampant – go figure).
For some insane reason, I decide not to take the “walk around the room wildly bouncing baby” route and instead do the unthinkable and start rocking him in the crook of my arm. It’s obviously not working, but I’m patient – Jesus WILL return to bring light to a world of darkness and oppression (even so, come quickly Michelle).
All of a sudden a hush fills the room…(hush)… and then the screaming resumes.
Now where the [expletive] did that hush come from?
Waaa Waaaa Nyaaaa Yaaa ….hush… Nuyaaa.
Ahah! There it is again! OMG! Had I done it? Had I actually found the mythical “Vulcan Sleep Grip”? Legend has it that there is a position that anyone can get into at any given time that will put a child to sleep instantly – EVEN WHEN THEY’RE SCREAMING bloody murder, and have been all night.
Now, apparently it takes years of training in the high-cliffed monasteries of Tibet to perfect this elite “Vulcan Sleep Grip”, so when you stumble upon it at 2 in the morning, it feels as if you’ve walked through a wormhole into another dimension. One where babies sleep contentedly next to their beautiful mothers, and where a neurotic father finds this a scary experience and feels the urge to stay up for an hour with a crick in his back writing about it (apparently the amazing Vulcan Sleep Grip only works if the father is in extreme discomfort, at a 43 degree angle, and his back is in the shape of a dancing dragon at a Chinese festival – and trust me, I KNOW what those look like).
A cool feature of this mythological pose, is that all u have to do to settle the tyke is waggle the arm that’s helplessly pinned to the bed by his body weight (it’s amazing what 3.5 kg feels like when you’ve lost circulation to your arm).
Wow, am I still typing? It’s been @ an hour and the Grip is still working it’s magic: Little Man’s stirred several times, but… waggle = instant settle every time. –Awesome!
OK. That’s it…. Go to sleep Steph.
(LNF: It's been 5 weeks since this post and "the Grip" is STILL his favorite position... Geez, let's hope it's not a case of "bad habits die hard" or I'm in for an interesting (read: "sleepless") next few months (or years? -gasp!)
