At this point, there’s no doubt. He prefers one brand of pacifier. I’m going explain how I know, but I probably only have about three minutes so I better type fast.
I had the one that Hannah and I bought together at Babies R Us today, and it’s this big bulbous thing, symmetrical from every perspective (top v bottom, left v right), which is obviously not the way one’s mouth is shaped, but the way they package these goddamn pacifiers you can’t check them out before you buy them, they’re trapped behind a yard of hard plastic, so you’re just trusting that Playtex or Gerber or whoever knows how to make a good pacifier. Then you get it home and it's obviously a dud, but you're stuck with it.
ANYWAY. It’s Anna’s birthday tonight, and Hannah is out boozing it up, or so I hope, because that will make me feel better for the nights when I go out boozing it up. And there I am with Elliot, and at first I dared to dream that Hey maybe he’ll drop off to sleep at 6:30 like they say in the No-Cry Sleep Solution. That’s when you’re supposed to put your kid to bed, 6:30pm. What a fucking joke. He lies there with his eyes open for a few minutes, staring at me like what are you kidding?
So we get up, and actually we have a nice hour together. I pour myself the bottom fourth of this shitty red bottle we have sitting in the window. I pull out the vacuum top and sure enough no pop at all, but I drink it anyway. And I pull out a round of goat cheese that I took off the food co-op for a buck fifty, and I stand there in the kitchen holding him in my right arm and stabbing the goat cheese with Wheat Thins and drinking wine with my left arm. And after a while this gets boring so I put in my headphones and I’m listening to Real Time with Bill Maher about the budget crisis, and he’s going on about how the government might shut down, but I know it didn’t because the program was recorded two weeks ago and I’m only just listening to it now. Why didn’t I listen to it earlier? Because I have a six month old, and that’s pretty much the answer I can give to any question you ask me these days.
So anyway, another hour goes by and I realize I told Hannah I might join her at Anna’s birthday thing later, with Elliot, but I can’t find my phone. And it’s pretty goddamn hard to hunt for a phone with a baby under one arm, but I’m trying, and it’s getting later and later, because I keep taking breaks to watch old reruns of The State (how I got turned on to that show is another story for another time). But so eventually I just have to put Elliot in his bumbo seat and dash about the apartment looking for the phone, going back over all the territory I already covered except more thoroughly, and with a clock ticking in my head, the How Long clock. How long will Elliot sit there before he starts screaming? And part of my mind is wondering if Hannah texted me a question like “Is Elliot still alive and well?” like an hour ago, and is currently freaking out because I haven’t written back, and I’m wondering what will happen if I don’t find my phone, like maybe an ambulance will just pull up in front of the house because Hannah didn’t want to take chances.
But eventually I find the phone, it’s behind a half-empty White Russian on the night table from weeks ago, which I thought I’d already looked behind, but phones are actually very very narrow and when you lie them flat they can hide behind even a thin sliver of cream and vodka.
There’s a text from Hannah asking if I want to come meet them at the bar. I look out the window and watch a sad umbrellaless person run through the pelting rain. I call Hannah and tell her Nope, we’re good here, I’m going to try to get him to sleep.
Which I do. Try.
Here’s where that horrible pacifier comes in. I know that getting him to sleep without the customary Real Live Boob that he is accustomed to is going to be a challenge. So I get everything lined up in advance. I have my three ounces of Real Live Frozen Boob Milk thawed and even warmed to near body temperature using the hottest water our kitchen faucet can produce. I have the Co-Sleeper cleared of detritus (i.e my own dirty clothes). I have the Sleep Sac laid out ready for his little perfect body.
My plan goes into motion. I give him the bottle, he loves it, his eyelids start to droop. I bring him into the dimly lit bedroom, close the door, and deposit him in the Sleep Sac. (It’s lying open on the bed, and it involves two snaps, one at each shoulder, plus a zipper that run from one hip to the other and circumnavigates the feet like Magellan didCape Horn .) He fusses a bit when put in the Sleep Sac, but knows the drill by now, and waits semi-patiently for the bottle to be reinserted after the Sleep Sac ritual. Which it is.
Now he’s really in the throes of the Nod Fairy. He can barely keep his eyes open. He’s still drinking the milk, and I estimate there are about 1.5 ounces still in there, which should get me/him across the finish line.
The key is putting him in the Co-Sleeper while he’s still awake but very near asleep. That way he knows where he’s falling asleep, he’s aware of it, but not so aware that he has the strength to protest. Kind of like the relationship between television and American elections.
And so he keeps draining the milk, and I have to get him into the Co-Sleeper before all the milk is gone, otherwise he will get angry and the whole process has to start again. But damn it, his eyes are still open! Maybe a few droops, a few long blinks, but nothing that would normally give me the courage to put him down.
But if i don’t put him down, and he drinks all the milk, then what do I have left? I’m cornered, without ammunition and with an angry baby in my arms. And my friend Timmy has said he would rather have an baby cougar than an angry baby in his arms. (I never asked about an angry baby cougar.)
So i take the risk. I put him down, and he starts fussing. He doesn’t want to be put down in the cold crib. But I pop that bottle back in his mouth and he gets right happy again. In fact, he closes his eyes and keeps them shut and starts to fall asleep.
So it seems like everything is great right? But no! Because now an even more serious dilemma faces me. Elliot is asleep, or at least in the early stages. But he’s still got this bottle in his mouth, which I am holding. Given his position in the crib, it’s pretty much vertical over his mouth hole. Which means it’s dripping milk, plop plop plop, into the back of his throat. All well and good if he’s swallowing it, but once he falls asleep for real, he’s going to stop swallowing. And all that milk is going to collect in the back of his throat and he’s going to aspirate it into his lung and drown. So no, things are not great.
The key decision for me now is, when is he asleep? He’s still actively sucking, and swallowing, so we’re good right now. But when has he gone from conscious awake sucking to unconscious asleep sucking? When he crosses that line, I have to yank the bottle of death milk faster than a fireman smashes the window of a Hyundai illegally parked in front of a fire hydrant.
Generally speaking, constant sucking means awake and intermittent sucking means asleep. Elliot stops sucking and I yank. Now it’s time to---
OH FUCK! WHAT AN IDIOT I AM!
We’ve reached the moment, of course, as any idiot would know, when you quickly substitute a pacifier in place of the milk bottle. But I can’t find the pacifier. I thought it was in my shirt pocket, but I’m not wearing a shirt with a pocket anymore. Now I’m wearing a hoodie sweatshirt with a kangaroo pouch. I muffle through there but it’s empty. I slap my hand along the night table, boom boom boom, nothing. I reach the other direction, to the bed, and DJ scratch my hand forward and back, hunting desperately along the sheet, failing.
He’s screaming now, of course, of course he is. Why wouldn’t he be. So I pick him back up. We’re at square one. Together we walk around the apartment looking for the pacifier. All I can find is the crappy one, that stupid symmetrical one, that un-human-mouth-shaped one, and I keep cramming it in his gaw hoping he’ll just shut up and take it, which he is not dumb/nice/accommodating/undiscriminating enough to do.
So I finally find this other pacifier, the one he likes, the one that conforms well to the roof of his mouth, and he drops off to sleep instantly. Like in a second. Like so fast it feels targeted at me: he is spitefully dropping off to sleep like a shot, just to prove what an unprepared asshole I am. You could have had all this, he seems to be saying. It could have been so beautiful. He mocks me with his angelic slumber and cherubic lips.
But so I put him down, and then begins yet another of the many chapters of getting this infant to sleep: the hand dance.
When I lie Elliot in the co-sleeper, with his little Sleep Sac constraining his legs, the only way he can display his narcoleptic discontent is with his arms. And weirdly, if you can control the arms, you can control the mind. If the arms stop being angry, he drops off to sleep and stays that way. I know it seems like it should be the other way around: if he falls asleep his arms will stop moving. But trust me on this. The arms come first, and then sleep follows.
You can’t just pin his arms down. That’s amateur style. He doesn't like being swaddled, it makes him feel constrained, and he will open his eyes and scream in your face. Neither can you allow him to flail. This will make him feel out of control, and a panic spiral will ensue, with each flail compounding the sense of disorientation created by the previous flail.
What you have to do is allow him to windmill his arms, but in a constant, controlled manner. Stable, rhythmic. Smooth. And you make him think it’s his idea. You take the arm-spasm of a child lost in the black forest swatting away a bat, and turn it into the yawning reach of a happy safe protected child after a bath.
(Let’s leave aside for right now the fact that safe and protected is what he ACTUALLY IS, so why I have to go through this goddamn ritual to make him FEEL safe, when he’s never been anything in his entire life BUT SAFE, absolutely nothing ever to indicate a lack of total protection, is beyond me. Let’s also leave aside the weirdness of the fact that I take the outbursts of infants personally.)
But so you let him grab your fingers with his little hands, and you let him push and tug, and his little arms windmill about, but eventually the steam goes out of them and they start drop. Are you done? No you are not. Because actually this moment of overconfidence is the most precarious, it’s when you can carelessly stumble and drop your victory into the jaws of defeat. I have done this.
His arms are somewhere in the air, or by his mouth, or resting against his chest. But as he falls deeper and deeper into sleep, those arms will flop. Wherever they are, they will drop until they are against the mattress. And when they smack against that mattress it will waken him, and he will startle forward into consciousness with a mighty, righteous cry, like the dragon in the old tale whose gold was tricked away from him while he slept.
I had the one that Hannah and I bought together at Babies R Us today, and it’s this big bulbous thing, symmetrical from every perspective (top v bottom, left v right), which is obviously not the way one’s mouth is shaped, but the way they package these goddamn pacifiers you can’t check them out before you buy them, they’re trapped behind a yard of hard plastic, so you’re just trusting that Playtex or Gerber or whoever knows how to make a good pacifier. Then you get it home and it's obviously a dud, but you're stuck with it.
ANYWAY. It’s Anna’s birthday tonight, and Hannah is out boozing it up, or so I hope, because that will make me feel better for the nights when I go out boozing it up. And there I am with Elliot, and at first I dared to dream that Hey maybe he’ll drop off to sleep at 6:30 like they say in the No-Cry Sleep Solution. That’s when you’re supposed to put your kid to bed, 6:30pm. What a fucking joke. He lies there with his eyes open for a few minutes, staring at me like what are you kidding?
So we get up, and actually we have a nice hour together. I pour myself the bottom fourth of this shitty red bottle we have sitting in the window. I pull out the vacuum top and sure enough no pop at all, but I drink it anyway. And I pull out a round of goat cheese that I took off the food co-op for a buck fifty, and I stand there in the kitchen holding him in my right arm and stabbing the goat cheese with Wheat Thins and drinking wine with my left arm. And after a while this gets boring so I put in my headphones and I’m listening to Real Time with Bill Maher about the budget crisis, and he’s going on about how the government might shut down, but I know it didn’t because the program was recorded two weeks ago and I’m only just listening to it now. Why didn’t I listen to it earlier? Because I have a six month old, and that’s pretty much the answer I can give to any question you ask me these days.
So anyway, another hour goes by and I realize I told Hannah I might join her at Anna’s birthday thing later, with Elliot, but I can’t find my phone. And it’s pretty goddamn hard to hunt for a phone with a baby under one arm, but I’m trying, and it’s getting later and later, because I keep taking breaks to watch old reruns of The State (how I got turned on to that show is another story for another time). But so eventually I just have to put Elliot in his bumbo seat and dash about the apartment looking for the phone, going back over all the territory I already covered except more thoroughly, and with a clock ticking in my head, the How Long clock. How long will Elliot sit there before he starts screaming? And part of my mind is wondering if Hannah texted me a question like “Is Elliot still alive and well?” like an hour ago, and is currently freaking out because I haven’t written back, and I’m wondering what will happen if I don’t find my phone, like maybe an ambulance will just pull up in front of the house because Hannah didn’t want to take chances.
But eventually I find the phone, it’s behind a half-empty White Russian on the night table from weeks ago, which I thought I’d already looked behind, but phones are actually very very narrow and when you lie them flat they can hide behind even a thin sliver of cream and vodka.
There’s a text from Hannah asking if I want to come meet them at the bar. I look out the window and watch a sad umbrellaless person run through the pelting rain. I call Hannah and tell her Nope, we’re good here, I’m going to try to get him to sleep.
Which I do. Try.
Here’s where that horrible pacifier comes in. I know that getting him to sleep without the customary Real Live Boob that he is accustomed to is going to be a challenge. So I get everything lined up in advance. I have my three ounces of Real Live Frozen Boob Milk thawed and even warmed to near body temperature using the hottest water our kitchen faucet can produce. I have the Co-Sleeper cleared of detritus (i.e my own dirty clothes). I have the Sleep Sac laid out ready for his little perfect body.
My plan goes into motion. I give him the bottle, he loves it, his eyelids start to droop. I bring him into the dimly lit bedroom, close the door, and deposit him in the Sleep Sac. (It’s lying open on the bed, and it involves two snaps, one at each shoulder, plus a zipper that run from one hip to the other and circumnavigates the feet like Magellan did
Now he’s really in the throes of the Nod Fairy. He can barely keep his eyes open. He’s still drinking the milk, and I estimate there are about 1.5 ounces still in there, which should get me/him across the finish line.
The key is putting him in the Co-Sleeper while he’s still awake but very near asleep. That way he knows where he’s falling asleep, he’s aware of it, but not so aware that he has the strength to protest. Kind of like the relationship between television and American elections.
And so he keeps draining the milk, and I have to get him into the Co-Sleeper before all the milk is gone, otherwise he will get angry and the whole process has to start again. But damn it, his eyes are still open! Maybe a few droops, a few long blinks, but nothing that would normally give me the courage to put him down.
But if i don’t put him down, and he drinks all the milk, then what do I have left? I’m cornered, without ammunition and with an angry baby in my arms. And my friend Timmy has said he would rather have an baby cougar than an angry baby in his arms. (I never asked about an angry baby cougar.)
So i take the risk. I put him down, and he starts fussing. He doesn’t want to be put down in the cold crib. But I pop that bottle back in his mouth and he gets right happy again. In fact, he closes his eyes and keeps them shut and starts to fall asleep.
So it seems like everything is great right? But no! Because now an even more serious dilemma faces me. Elliot is asleep, or at least in the early stages. But he’s still got this bottle in his mouth, which I am holding. Given his position in the crib, it’s pretty much vertical over his mouth hole. Which means it’s dripping milk, plop plop plop, into the back of his throat. All well and good if he’s swallowing it, but once he falls asleep for real, he’s going to stop swallowing. And all that milk is going to collect in the back of his throat and he’s going to aspirate it into his lung and drown. So no, things are not great.
The key decision for me now is, when is he asleep? He’s still actively sucking, and swallowing, so we’re good right now. But when has he gone from conscious awake sucking to unconscious asleep sucking? When he crosses that line, I have to yank the bottle of death milk faster than a fireman smashes the window of a Hyundai illegally parked in front of a fire hydrant.
Generally speaking, constant sucking means awake and intermittent sucking means asleep. Elliot stops sucking and I yank. Now it’s time to---
OH FUCK! WHAT AN IDIOT I AM!
We’ve reached the moment, of course, as any idiot would know, when you quickly substitute a pacifier in place of the milk bottle. But I can’t find the pacifier. I thought it was in my shirt pocket, but I’m not wearing a shirt with a pocket anymore. Now I’m wearing a hoodie sweatshirt with a kangaroo pouch. I muffle through there but it’s empty. I slap my hand along the night table, boom boom boom, nothing. I reach the other direction, to the bed, and DJ scratch my hand forward and back, hunting desperately along the sheet, failing.
He’s screaming now, of course, of course he is. Why wouldn’t he be. So I pick him back up. We’re at square one. Together we walk around the apartment looking for the pacifier. All I can find is the crappy one, that stupid symmetrical one, that un-human-mouth-shaped one, and I keep cramming it in his gaw hoping he’ll just shut up and take it, which he is not dumb/nice/accommodating/undiscriminating enough to do.
So I finally find this other pacifier, the one he likes, the one that conforms well to the roof of his mouth, and he drops off to sleep instantly. Like in a second. Like so fast it feels targeted at me: he is spitefully dropping off to sleep like a shot, just to prove what an unprepared asshole I am. You could have had all this, he seems to be saying. It could have been so beautiful. He mocks me with his angelic slumber and cherubic lips.
But so I put him down, and then begins yet another of the many chapters of getting this infant to sleep: the hand dance.
When I lie Elliot in the co-sleeper, with his little Sleep Sac constraining his legs, the only way he can display his narcoleptic discontent is with his arms. And weirdly, if you can control the arms, you can control the mind. If the arms stop being angry, he drops off to sleep and stays that way. I know it seems like it should be the other way around: if he falls asleep his arms will stop moving. But trust me on this. The arms come first, and then sleep follows.
You can’t just pin his arms down. That’s amateur style. He doesn't like being swaddled, it makes him feel constrained, and he will open his eyes and scream in your face. Neither can you allow him to flail. This will make him feel out of control, and a panic spiral will ensue, with each flail compounding the sense of disorientation created by the previous flail.
What you have to do is allow him to windmill his arms, but in a constant, controlled manner. Stable, rhythmic. Smooth. And you make him think it’s his idea. You take the arm-spasm of a child lost in the black forest swatting away a bat, and turn it into the yawning reach of a happy safe protected child after a bath.
(Let’s leave aside for right now the fact that safe and protected is what he ACTUALLY IS, so why I have to go through this goddamn ritual to make him FEEL safe, when he’s never been anything in his entire life BUT SAFE, absolutely nothing ever to indicate a lack of total protection, is beyond me. Let’s also leave aside the weirdness of the fact that I take the outbursts of infants personally.)
But so you let him grab your fingers with his little hands, and you let him push and tug, and his little arms windmill about, but eventually the steam goes out of them and they start drop. Are you done? No you are not. Because actually this moment of overconfidence is the most precarious, it’s when you can carelessly stumble and drop your victory into the jaws of defeat. I have done this.
His arms are somewhere in the air, or by his mouth, or resting against his chest. But as he falls deeper and deeper into sleep, those arms will flop. Wherever they are, they will drop until they are against the mattress. And when they smack against that mattress it will waken him, and he will startle forward into consciousness with a mighty, righteous cry, like the dragon in the old tale whose gold was tricked away from him while he slept.
And then tiptoe out of the room and pray.
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