Remember that song by Joan Osbourne, "What if God Was One of Us?"
Updated for the digital era: What if God is a Blog Reader?
I think He must be.
Tom Siegman wrote a nice birthday email.
Hope that your new year is just interesting enough to provide compelling blogging without being so interesting that it's not fun to live through.
Tom set down the criteria and God delivered.
Friday night, we were trying to put Calanit to sleep and she was giving us a really hard time. It was one of the most difficult nights we have faced. I mean, uncontrollable. Combination of fatigue and a sugar high/low, but still quite ugly.
It was actually the first time I'd consciously thought to myself, "remember, becoming a grandparent is the reward you get for not having killed your own kids." [I was frustrated, but not to a point of a homicidal nature, of course]. Eventually, the payoff arrives.
We did all we could to bathe her, had to hold her down to get her pajamas on, and then move her into her room.
By the time our guests arrived to help celebrate the birthday, I said to them (none of whom have kids yet)...
"If you had been here 30 minutes ago, I think you could have been convinced to never have children."
The dinner went off beautifully...no kids crying, none waking up. A great meal with some great people. Josh Halpern asks me, "so, what do you want for your birthday?"
"At my stage, I'd be happy with a nap."
Call it foreshadowing...
We went to bed.
At 5.30am, we hear Erez screaming.
I get into his room and discover him standing up in his "sleepy" pajamas (you know, the kind with the feet coverings...)
Why is he standing?
Well, let's just say his dirty diaper came unhinged inside the pajamas and he was covered in, uh, shall we say, human excrement.
Out of nowhere, Calanit appears. Erez is shrieking...I'm exhausted.
I grab Erez out of the crib, take him into the bathroom and strip him...doing my best to avoid any unnecessary contact, if you get my drift.
Calanit follows us into the bathroom. By this point, there is another adult in the bathroom (can't use her name, however, see here) and I'm yelling
"Code Red! Code Red!"
I take Erez and put him down in the tub. He starts SHRIEKING!
It's only then that I realized that because of the challenges in putting Calanit to bed the night before, we had inadvertently forgotten to drain the tub, so the poor guy is sitting in ICE COLD WATER!
Eventually, the situation stabilizes and three of the people in the house go back to sleep.
I am not among them.
For a variety of reasons, it's not until 1.30pm that I can finally slow down and after getting some beautiful cards from my wife and kids, I finally get my nap.
I wake up at 5.30pm...yes 4 hours!
So, a little pilates tonight with see here, a little blogging, and there you have it...a start to the year that I think meets Tom's criteria.
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