Dear Internet-at-large,
Yesterday afternoon, after a day where I most emphatically HAD ENOUGH, I actually committed biological warfare on a small scale by dumping Saag and Naan on my unsuspecting family for several hours and made good my escape to the relative mindless bliss of grocery shopping. Mind you, a mazy head with fatigue and smooth negotiation of the whirling maelstrom that is a shopping centre approaching December do not entirely mix. Let me count the ways:
- Run over many unsuspecting feet with poorly controlled and one dodgy wheeled trolley? Check. Incidentally, do they make the daft things in the factory with one dodgy wheel, or am I perpetually unlucky in this regard?
- Forget where I left my illegally parked car and have brief panic that the bloody thing had been towed before finding it? Also check.
- Liberal use of panic button on car alarm as a sort of echo-location device in achieving the previous aim scaring the bejeebers out of half the carpark? Yep.
So, given I could not simply leave my I-have-to-be-honest vile spawn in the care of others until she turned thrity and became reasonable again, I took action. For both of our sakes.
With many unhappy mutterings of ‘Enough is sodding enough, you little bugger’ to a wailing-for-most-of-the-day Naan (who clearly must have repeatedly got out of her cot on the wrong side), I did the following:
- Fed her up to her red-rimmed and tearing eyeballs,
- Gave her some paracetamol on spec (Who the heck knows, right? My ears were hurting with all the yelling, so at the very least hers might have been by then),
- Resisted adding some phe.nergan to the mix (barely),
- Swaddled her truly demonically,
- and then stuck her bundled up form firmly into a sleep sack so a Houdini like escape was truly impossible.
Oh, and I plugged her yell-hole with a dum-dum.
I dumped her in her cot and went to bed and got a blessed seven hours sleep before she woke up genuinely hungry.
I think we all needed it- she’s positively a new baby today who clearly can’t be the same infant who was so very vile for the last few days. Clearly. THIS infant is actually likable for people other than her parents.
Why, as I type this missive, my younger sproglette is cooing at her toys whilst trying to figure out how to remove and re-insert her own dum-dum. She’s not yelling, which I find amusing given that so far she’s managed to pull it out, but returning it to the rather obvious central-ish wet hole in her face is presenting her with rather more difficulty.
She’s managed to chew on the side thoughtfully for a few minutes before working out that this clearly wasn’t right. Then she rejiggered her hold, lined things up again and poked herself with increasing enthusiasm in her left eyeball with the teat. Until deciding that seeing her dum-dum in such close detail is not the intended outcome either. Stumped at least temporarily, she is now happily waving it about in her fist.
Did I mention she’s not yelling?
Praise bloody be.
