Every morning when I wake up…

If you believe me, you know it memes you have to disbelieve yourself...

So here we go, I have to make good on my promise for a funny post. I certainly hope I can deliver.

It has been decided that my child has some relation to a great magician. We don’t really know which one yet, we’re still doing the research. Oh, I bet now you want the story about why we think he’s related to a magician? Typical.

I’ve mentioned before that he loves his SwaddleMe (PLUG! PLUG! PLUG!). Also, as mentioned before, this thing is virtually a baby straight jacket, it’s designed to keep your baby locked up and immobile so that you can continue doing the things you want to do and they can’t get away. I don’t think I’m going to get free gear for descriptions like that. If you’re from the Summer Infant company, please disregard that last run-on sentence. I’d tell you to disregard all the run-on sentences but then you wouldn’t really be reading my blog would you?

Right, we strap him into the baby straight jacket every night. Strong and secure. These are hardcore Velcro pieces that we have difficulty getting apart sometimes. So, seriously, it’s not something you would expect little ones to break out of. Well, our little guy manages to get out EVERY night. Ok, not all the way out. One arm.

That’s right he wiggles and squirms all night just to get that arm out. He doesn’t wake up, he just keeps that arm moving until he can break it out. Even better, some nights we double swaddle him. SwaddleMe and a blanket, sure enough, without fail, that arm is sticking out in the morning.

Every morning as we go in to check on him there’s that arm straight up over his head. Being a nerd and also having referenced it before, it makes me think of the ___ ALL the ___ meme.

Which leads me to my other conclusion our baby is a living meme. Now, I realize that I am a meme follower and this may make me see things because I am already aware of them.

It’s like mirage, yanno, you’re in the desert and you’re dying of thirst, you’re absolutely sure that there must be water ahead, so you see an oasis. Wait, no, that’s a terrible example.

It’s like when you buy a car, you’ve NEVER seen anyone else driving that car before, you feel special, unique, ORIGINAL. Then suddenly you see them everywhere, you realize you’re just one of millions of people driving the same generic car around. Being aware of your new, unoriginal, unspecial, ununique, car doesn’t mean people didn’t have them before, it just means you didn’t see notice that they did. Unfortunately, it does crush your spirit. Oh hey, look at my sweet word making skills.

Ah yes, my baby is a living meme. It doesn’t end there, he gets wild hair in the morning, probably due to all the fidgeting throughout the night as he David Copperfields his arm out of the Velcro prison. It’s amazingly wild, then he gets this look and puts his hands out just like the crazy Ancient Aliens guy. Now, sure he would look like that guy with just the crazy hair, but with the hands too? It’s uncanny! UNCANNY, I tell you!

Finally, he gets the serious business face. All kids do it, but when you try to get him to smile or anything else, he just stays there with that serious look on his face. I realize that comparing my child to a cat meme is kind of pathetic, but I can’t help it. I keep wondering what will be next, maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll start making the Joseph Decreux pose. It’s ok if you don’t get that last one.

I know the shame in your defeat…

Crying, crying, cryyyyyyyying...

We have been preparing for this for months. Months, I say. I mean, basically, the day we found out, we started planning. We had this thing figured out. Well, you can go through my past posts to see that we’ve had our thinking caps on from the beginning. We both knew that there would be things we would miss. We both knew that there was no real way to prepare for everything, but we tried.

So, there we were, our first night home with him. He’d been great, he slept all day, he did his dirty work when he needed to, ate when he needed to, everything was going swimmingly. See this is where I would normally drop the bomb. I’d come up with some clever way to explain the events. You would laugh. YOU WOULD LAUGH.

Well, I’m sorry, I have no bomb to drop. The first night at home was amazing. Well, ok… There was a minor hiccup. Mommy put him down in his little bassinet, we both went to sleep. Ah, beautiful sleep. I love you sleep.

Two hours later we wake to crying. Ok, SHE wakes to crying. I continued sleeping. I am a heavy sleeper. Her little sisters used to climb all over me when I would fall asleep on the couch. My nephews and nieces used to run all around me screaming whilst I slept. I slept through a tornado. Seriously.

So she gets up and assumes he’s hungry. He probably isn’t, but he’s my boy, so he can’t refuse food. After the feeding frenzy, he starts crying again. She checks his diaper and he’s dry. She elbows me awake. He’s squealing like a banshee. She encourages me to try to figure out what is wrong with him.

I, being a new father yet somewhat familiar with children, assess the situation. I decide she has been holding him the wrong way and attempt different holding techniques. None of them work. I thought the head down, hanging by one ankle would do the trick. It is ineffective. He’s very angry, this much is clear. Why he’s angry, I have no clue. I check his diaper again. Dry as a bone. I ask if she had nursed him. She gives me a look that says, “Way to go Einstein, I would have never thought of that. You sir, are brilliant!” She’s lucky I caught the tone of the look, or I might have been proud of myself.

Ok, so he’s eaten, he’s dry, fifteen different holds have not worked, we are baffled. I’m holding him in the lateral-under-arm-preacher-curl and say to him, “I’m sorry little guy, you got stuck with two people who have no idea what they’re doing. I wish we knew how to help you.”

Maybe it was admitting defeat, but suddenly in the midst of the leg-out-two-arm-torso-cross, I feel a wet spot. A WET SPOT? Yes, friends, a wet spot.

See, we swaddle the little chap, he loves being held close, so we determined that swaddling would be a great option for sleeping. We actually have this thing called a SwaddlePod, this is basically a baby straight-jacket. The little guy loves it, he hates to sleep without it. (This is clearly a plug, hoping that the people who make SwaddlePod, which is Summer Infant, will give me free stuff, but seriously, he loves the thing. He also loves the SwaddleMe.) Well it zips from the bottom and the top, so you have easy access to the evil that is bound to be ejected from the child. I’m clearly not talking about vomit here, though that is evil too.

The point I was making was that we roll the SwaddlePod up and then the Onesie (trademarked by Gerber, who can also send me free stuff) to access the goods (or bads depending on the perspective). Finding the diaper dry, means the little guy hasn’t whizzed on himself, right? Oh how wrong we were.

Apparently, my baby is a ninja. There’s no other explanation. Ninjas are virtually undetectable, one could be standing right beside you and you’d never know. There are three facts I know about ninjas. Ninjas are mammals. Ninjas fight ALL the time. And finally, the purpose of a ninja is to freak out and kill people. At least two of these facts are true about my baby. I will let you decide which ones.

Oh, right, I forgot where I was going with this. I got so caught up in the awesomeness that is ninjas that I completely derailed. Sorry about that. So, he’s magically wet up his side, yet the diaper is dry. Conclusion? Ninja pee.

So, we finally get the little guy changed and he’s out cold. Amazing. An hour plus of crying, and everything is made better by change of clothes. What a great first night!