Bridgette and I are going on 70+ hours of Oliver crying inconsolably whenever he isn’t sleeping. He had a cold, then got another cold, and now has a sore throat. We’ve tried soothing him every way we can, but the doctors said we just have to help him endure while the virus takes its course.
This is about as much fun as having your genitals shocked with an electrical charge by Ben Franklin for the amusement of a bunch of dandy French bastards.
Life with a sick, screaming infant is certainly different. Your focus shrinks down to surviving the next few minutes and the puzzle of coaxing comfort from a red-faced, drooling baby. This is something like trying to force-feed pills to a yowling cat while the countown timer from Catchphrase is about to go off. The effects of the exhaustion, screaming and sleeplessness are that time somehow stretches and your sense of despair heightens to Kirkegaardian depths as you experience the vertigo that comes with cognitively confronting the ultimately unknowable subjective realities that define life. Also, the noxious blast of your baby’s breath smells like germs and breastmilk, which doesn’t especially help.
If there were some way I could wipe Oliver’s desperate tears away and help him to feel better, I would. I have tried bouncing him, holding him, and rolling him. I have bathed him and sung to him and twirled him. For all my child-rearing effectiveness, I might as well as been Barney the Dinosaur with a gun in my mouth in a Burmese prison cell.
On the plus side, I got to watch a DVD about Abraham Lincoln I got for Christmas at 4am last night. Apparently his trials were somewhat harder than mine and he didn’t have lovely history DVDs to help him through the night. He only had a telegraph ticker and the sturdy arms of Edwin M. Stanton.
Well, he’s up and crying again. Wish us luck, everyone! Hopefully we won’t all get carbon monoxide poisoning!