My wife and I are new parents, and we’re really sleep-deprived. Last night I was up feeding my son, and I thought he’d somehow gotten a teardrop tattoo near his eye. In the end, it was just a teardrop-shaped piece of lint. I know I probably should’ve brushed it away, but I didn’t. I glued it on so the other kids at his daycare know what’s what.
While my son is the biggest sleep disrupter, he’s not the only one to blame. Lately, my wife and I are riddled with anxiety, grappling with a bunch of tough parenting choices. For instance, is that security system we installed an absolute necessity? Some nights I think I’ll call the security company and cancel it, but then I look over at my precious child sleeping next to me in the soothing green light of our panic room, with his valuable baby kidneys and those gold doubloons I’ve hidden in his thigh folds, and I’ll think to myself “Is 2:00 a.m. too late to take another Ambien?”
Even when our baby is asleep, sometimes we are woken up by a car alarm or by our Roomba having weird machine sex with the Diaper Genie. To be honest, I used to be jealous that these two were always getting down, but now I’m just grateful someone around here has that kind of energy.
The last few nights have been awful, and my wife and I are really starting to slip. When I went to bed last night, I forgot to close the panic room baby gate, and I found my son standing near the edge of the stairs. Fortunately, I scooped him up before he fell down the stairs and broke his head open on the reinforced steel door of our guest panic room.
Thankfully, everything is clearer in the light of day. This morning my son and I sat on the couch and read books and played a ton of peek-a-boo. Whenever a gold doubloon fell out of one of his thigh folds, I picked it up and shoved it back in there for safekeeping. He usually laughs when I do this, but sometimes I start hyperventilating because I can only think about how few gold doubloons are stuffed into his legs and how much college tuition will cost in 2035.