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Yesterday I had a nice time babysitting Carmela & Co with Brother Linux & Wife. Unfortunately Leon, and to a lesser extent Loke as well, was afflicted with a cold. Also, the boy noobs were all excited to have visitors and stayed up playing all afternoon while Ciara napped with the result that they conked out as soon as their wee heads touched the cribs, but Ciara, the little fusspot, grumbled and squeaked and stayed up an extra forty-five minutes being rocked, bounced, sung to, and read to before she consented to lie down. And then it started: the piteous howls of an exhausted baby who can't sleep because his respiratory tract is full of diseased slime. Poor Leon had us springing up and downstairs for a couple of hours as we attempted to watch Transformers. Basically, it was exhausting.
4 May 2008
Did I mention that my thighs hurt?
4 May 2008 11:50 pm"Your thighs hurt, Cim?" you ask. "Why is that? Anything interesting?"
As a matter of fact, it is mildly interesting - although probably not what you imagined.
You might have been party to a conversation, earlier, when I recounted the noob-soothing strategy of playing air guitar (to mix it up I also play air saxophone, air flute, and air harmonica quite a bit). When it is necessary to keep the buggers awake, or distract them so that one can push puréed foodstuffs into their mouths as they stare in bafflement at one, air-instruments, bouncing, arm-waving, and other sorts of dancing are the order of the day. At Easter, memorably, while Leena and Tina (Brother Linux's wife and the noobs' mother respectively) collaborated at shoving babyfood into them, Brother Windows and I performed an air guitar duet with him singing some metal song or other off key. (We received strenuous applause from the adults in the household - the noobs held still and stared with mouths agape, which was the best result to be hoped for.)
So yesterday when we started feeding baby dinner to the babies, Leon, the snivelly little pillock, took exception to his perfectly ordinary fruit porridge and started cutting up rough. We went from firmly closed lips to squeaking and grunting to red-faced screaming until I was obliged to drag the entire highchair halfway around the house and station him in front of the full-length mirror on the coat closet, at Leena's suggestion. That wasn't quite enough to soothe him, however - for that I was required to sing and dance (I went through as many repetitions of Tina's mom's perfectly foul 'The Car Says Vroom!' song as I could stand before branching out into the Cole Porter Songbook and the entire soundtrack of Singin' in the Rain). The singing and dancing was required to be strenuous in order to startle and distract Leon from his slime-stuffed respiratory passages and/or his doubts about the occasional displeasing bite. Jazz hands, The Twist, standing on one foot, and bouncing up and down were all required. In the end he did eat the entire bowl, though.
Not all that surprising that my thighs hurt, all thngs considered. If it happens again, I'm going to find a less thigh-intensive method of dancing, though.
As a matter of fact, it is mildly interesting - although probably not what you imagined.
You might have been party to a conversation, earlier, when I recounted the noob-soothing strategy of playing air guitar (to mix it up I also play air saxophone, air flute, and air harmonica quite a bit). When it is necessary to keep the buggers awake, or distract them so that one can push puréed foodstuffs into their mouths as they stare in bafflement at one, air-instruments, bouncing, arm-waving, and other sorts of dancing are the order of the day. At Easter, memorably, while Leena and Tina (Brother Linux's wife and the noobs' mother respectively) collaborated at shoving babyfood into them, Brother Windows and I performed an air guitar duet with him singing some metal song or other off key. (We received strenuous applause from the adults in the household - the noobs held still and stared with mouths agape, which was the best result to be hoped for.)
So yesterday when we started feeding baby dinner to the babies, Leon, the snivelly little pillock, took exception to his perfectly ordinary fruit porridge and started cutting up rough. We went from firmly closed lips to squeaking and grunting to red-faced screaming until I was obliged to drag the entire highchair halfway around the house and station him in front of the full-length mirror on the coat closet, at Leena's suggestion. That wasn't quite enough to soothe him, however - for that I was required to sing and dance (I went through as many repetitions of Tina's mom's perfectly foul 'The Car Says Vroom!' song as I could stand before branching out into the Cole Porter Songbook and the entire soundtrack of Singin' in the Rain). The singing and dancing was required to be strenuous in order to startle and distract Leon from his slime-stuffed respiratory passages and/or his doubts about the occasional displeasing bite. Jazz hands, The Twist, standing on one foot, and bouncing up and down were all required. In the end he did eat the entire bowl, though.
Not all that surprising that my thighs hurt, all thngs considered. If it happens again, I'm going to find a less thigh-intensive method of dancing, though.