I Think My Baby Has Night Terrors

I joke, of course, but only to mask the feeling of helplessness.

Our baby Cassius came over a month early, and despite this fact, despite his difficult time getting enough food and the hard time with jaundice, despite the extraordinarily aggressive feeding regimen, we were able to keep him out of the hospital during his first month of breathing air.

Happy Month-day, Boy!

Part of the aggressive feeding schedule was that we'd have to wake him every three hours (if he was asleep, and most of the time he was), put him to the breast for only five minutes so he can get used to it, then Corrie'd hand him over to me and I'd hit him up with the bottle.

What about nipple preference? we'd ask. That's where babies who get the bottle don't want to return to the breast because it's so much more work. They told us: "Don't worry about that. That's more for full-term babies, and your baby needs a ton of calories, and you're going to have make sure he gets it."

The numbers that we had to get him were so high, impossibly so in the beginning...discouragingly so...

We kept at it; Cass got better and better and bigger and bigger, and now we don't need to supplement with the bottle. Cass mostly directs the feedings.

But then Corrie got sick.

Sleep deprivation is a real thing, for sure. I'm not the same pulling-all-nighters young man anymore---this not having more than three hours of sleep in a row for a month wears on you. Conversations you think you've had with people never happened. The days bleed together into one long, weary routine. On top of that, your body slowly deteriorates and you become far more susceptible to sickness, like your older cat sneezing directly in your face.

Corrie's fever broke, but she's the most run-down I've seen her since the last few months of senior year at Cal Poly when she slept only 10 hours a week. So she feeds the boy, pumps, bottles it, and gets some sleep, and later I feed the boy with the bottle, then crash myself.

Teamwork!

Now, in the random wee hours of the darkness, when I get my boy out of his crib and he's looking like he's about to lose his shit, I pop that bottle in his gob and his little eyes widen.

And he crushes the bottle. He destroys 70 cc like a college freshman downs cans of the cheap stuff during spring break. Goes through it in four or five minutes. Proud papa over here.

THEN, after the obligatory holding-him-upright-to-help-with-digestion period (incidentally three times as long as it took him to chug the booby-juice), I put him down to sleep and he becomes a shell-shocked World War II vet with searing constipation.

At least that what he sounds like.

Grunts and wails and more grunting and "aaaarrrrgghhrrgghhaa"s followed by the sound of a tiny raspberry being blown permeates the room. It's a perplexing mix of frustration (what the hell can I do for you?) and laughs (sleep deprivation-induced gleeful cackling for FART NOISES).

The poor guy.

So, in years past my Google searches may have veered towards the fringes but now are closer to "baby farting, too much?" and "beano okay for baby?"

I've got a shade of Luddite in me in that I still use the question marks in Google searches.

I wouldn't give my kid Beano, but the dazed and weary brain begins to look at everything...what the hell can I do for you?