Magic Pills

Don't exist. However, like most first time mom's I used to believe in them. When my son was 5 weeks old, he would not stop fussing. I had to change his onesie and I put him in a red one, he stopped. I made him wear that same onesie for like a week thinking something about it was magical. It wasn't.

My son was a 45 minute napper from about 3 weeks old until he was almost a year old. Every single nap the boy took was only 45 minutes long, then he'd wake up screaming like someone was trying to kill him. I tried every technique in the book. Comforting, patting, ignoring, feeding, almost nothing worked. The only time he would return to finish out a nap was when he was ill or he would be so drop dead tired, he wouldn't fight it anymore and I could lull him back.

I remember one day he cried at 45 minutes. I went into his room ready for "go back to sleep battle take 1 million", when I sneezed. He stopped crying and I put his pacifier back in and he closed his eyes. MY SNEEZE I thought, something about that made him go back to sleep. For the next 2 weeks, I would enter his room when he would wake up and attempt to sneeze. It never worked again.

I swaddled my daughter until she was 10 months old for her naps. I was convinced that if I stopped, she would never sleep. I finally had to stop when she figured out how to undo the lockdown velco straps and got them caught in her hair leading to a screaming fit. She didn't need the swaddle but I was convinced she did.

These are just small examples of my lunacy, but NOTHING compares to my husband. I suppose it has something to do with his baseball background but he is utterly obsessed with magic pills. He thinks that if one thing is done differently or out of sequence the twins will spontaneously combust. As you can guess, his middle name is definitely not "flexible".

When doing a diaper change he will do everything the exact same including a pat on the stomach after he finishes. When putting down for naps, he will place the stuffed animals in the crib in precise order and gets enraged if I put the crib together and accidently put the bunny-bear on the right instead of the left.

During a bad bout with upper teeth coming though, one night we ran out of cherry flavored tylenol and I handed him grape flavored. You could see his face melt when he looked at it. "What is this?!?", I said, "Tylenol", he said, "but ya, but, it's purple. She won't like it, she's going to wake up tonight because she's not used to this taste." He gave it to her anyway. When she woke up crying at 3am (just like she had done the past 4 nights) he turned over in bed and said, see! that damn Tylenol messed her up, why did you buy something different!

So, nights like tonight are never my favorite. We have no hot water. A pipe broke on the other side of the house and they're working on it. I tried to tell my husband to be optimistic because at least we have water tonight (b/c I didn't have it all day today). But alas, he was a wreck, for we had to bathe the kids standing up with wash cloths instead of being submerged in a bathtub.

He's so superstitious, that even though they were not wet from their wipe off, he wrapped them up in a towel and pretended to dry them off before dressing them. When I asked what he was doing, he said, they'll think they had a bath, it'll be ok...as beads of sweat drip from his brow. The kids didn't care, they went to bed just fine, but he's come out here from the living room already asking, are they crying? is everything ok? Sigh.

I'm lucky that he helps me out, I just keep telling myself that. But he's the only man I know that can eat a peanut butter (only!) sandwich for lunch for a month and not care or notice.