Son of a biscuit, the baby tricked us. Our routine presently is Baby goes to sleep at around 9-10pm, and then sleeps until 1am-3am, depending on how cool he wants to be. Because Dan is a saint and refuses to abandon me emotionally (mostly because he is a saint but also, I suspect, because leaving me to my own emotions is a dangerous game), we both sleep in the living room on the couch for the first stretch so that we can fall asleep to stand-up comedy and remember that there is still humor in the world. Then around 1-3am, he can change any diapers, and then we go our separate ways to sleep in actual beds like human beings and not weary college students.
It has been a working system so far.
Last night we were certain it was going to be a bad night. Baby decided instead of a baby, he was a voracious monster who consumed only milk every hour, on the hour. By 9pm, I was not certain I still had any fluid left in my body, and there was still an hour and a half before he descended back to the deep and returned the body of a cute baby who wanted to go numnumnum and stretch and fall asleep like a milk-drunk koala. Dan and I were incredulous that this baby wanted to sleep at all, and anticipated a long night ahead of us of more bottomless garbage can-style eating. We put on Anthony Jeselnik’s stand-up and passed out on our respective couches.
We both wake up in a daze at 2:30am, Dan because he thought he heard the baby and me because I am now certain our house is filled with ghosts, because for some unknown reason our living room light with the fan turned itself on at max capacity right then and everyone knows the only reason lights turn on around 3am is because of ghosts. Dan is too tired to understand why I am talking about ghosts at all, and asks if the baby is awake. I say no, and we look at the clock and figure he will wake up soon, so we both lay our heads back down, expecting to wake up within the hour to perform our nightly duties, a phrase that once had a much different connotation but oddly enough the same amount of crying.
We wake up again to the sound of the baby fussing. Dan blearily makes his way to the bassinet, I grab my phone to track the baby’s sleep, because the world has capitalized on the generation of gaming children who now are gaming adults and watch baby sleep increase all day like a high score.
The phone says that it is 5am. For the first time, our baby slept for 6.5 hours straight, and like fools, we spent our first wonderful night of uninterrupted sleep on the couch and not sprawled out in our glorious beds.
Once again, Don’t Trust The Baby. Don’t trust him to sleep, and apparently, don’t trust him to not sleep either.
In other news, Baby went to his first bar! There is a most excellent place in Asheville called The Root Bar. It is everything you could want in a neighborhood bar. It is shabby, it is smelly, it serves its mixed drinks in plastic pint glasses, and it has one bartender who does not give a fuck if you buy a drink or not. There is a stage that at some point we will survey live music, but most important, it has a magnificent back patio with three sandy courts that are home to the game Rootball, which is a combination of horseshoes and bocce ball that was invented at said bar. Everyone who goes to the Root Bar knows one another, or knows one another by the end of the night, and everyone plays Rootball.
Our friend was playing in the tournament, and invited us to join. Anyone who has been following along and knows what my rubric was for moving to a new place, I confess that I had one other factor that I didn’t even know needed to be on the list until we came to North Carolina last year: are babies allowed in bars? The answer back then seemed to be “I guess so?” and I was eager to test such a theory.
It turns out that the answer is probably? At least no one stopped us, nor did they try to kick us out as the evening progressed. Baby, for his part, did his perfect impersonation of someone who was wildly drunk and passed out on my chest for the entirety of his stay at the bar.
The other hallmark of a good neighborhood bar is a mixture of age groups. Young girls mixed with older women, but in true dive bar fashion, they were all wearing basically the same uniform of quirky crazy ladies you would really like to be friends with. One of these older women came up to me and cooed over the baby, saying how cute he was and that she’d love to just run off with him.
I laughed, and the younger girl I had met next to me said, “Careful, she’s pretty serious. She might actually run off with your baby.”
“Oh, I’m not worried,” I replied. “I installed a kill switch so if anybody runs too far with him, he just explodes.”
The older woman stared at me. The young girl stared at me.
“Cuz you know,” I added, “if I can’t have him, no one can.”
The younger girl finally laughed, while the older woman, clearly not a connoisseur of fine comedy, looked horrified and walked away.
It is the first time so far that I have found parenting confusing. We are allowed to joke about kidnapping babies, but not allowed to joke about exploding them? Ridiculous. I refuse to live in that world. Don’t joke about kidnapping my baby if you’re not prepared to know the lengths I will go to prevent it.
I'm so sorry for her not getting that amazing joke. She has a sad life.