TBOT 3 – Teddy Through 6 Months!

“And he grew and he grew and he grew.” – Love You Forever.

 

 

DAY CARE, DON’T DAY?

Sometimes, you can’t win. Picking between the local home daycare (close to home, either of us can drop off or pickup, semi-reasonably priced) or the daycare center at Sai’s office (shared HOV commute with Teddy, lunchtime nursing, fully Sai’s responsibility) or door number three (in home nanny of questionable visa status), my contribution was to nix the nanny (after Sai told me it wouldn’t be a hot young thing for me to ogle).  Between the two daycare providers, friends and family told us pros and cons for being close to home (pro – you can still drop off if you’re working from home or running errands on an off-day; con – you have to rush home from work to get to pick-up in time) versus close to work (pros – you can visit during work breaks, less stress about picking up on time; cons – long drive to drop-off if you have errands to run sans son, costs a goddamn fortune).  Since someone (I highly suspect Sai) bought Teddy a onesie with the message that “daddy and I agree, mommy is the boss”, I wisely deferred to the boss on the final decision, especially since she would bear the full brunt of drop off and pick up responsibilities with the latter option.

She picked the home daycare. Our dwindling savings account breathed a sigh of relief.  We filled out the form for Sai to drop off the next day.  The next day, while I was at work counting my blessings that I wouldn’t need to take on a second job to pay for daycare, Sai informed me that the boss had changed her mind.  At this stage in our relationship, I was unsurprised by the waffle, oh well, it’s only (a heck of a lot of) money.  DINK (double income, no kids) = $$$$.  DIOKID (double income one kid in daycare) = $.  I can’t imagine how people survive with less than double incomes or more than one kid.  The only saving grace in this all is that Sai’s time at home alone with Teddy taught her that the stay-at-home mom route is not for her (SIOKIDON – single income one kid in daycare or not = $).

Okay, plan B, decision made, budget being reevaluated, at least Teddy will be in good hands. We went to visit the facility with our son so that he could voice his approval (as if we’re a democracy instead of a Saiocracy).  During the combined lunchtime hours they package two groups of infants into the same room while different teachers take turns eating their own lunches, and you would not believe what we witnessed (unless you can picture what happens whenever a group of babies shares the same space).  There were kids crying!  Egads, no, that cannot be!  Sai was horrified.  CTFD, I suggested, as crying babies are not necessarily the same as neglected children, and the providers seemed to be working the room in an orderly fashion addressing the pressing needs of the noisy tykes.

A week later, she visited again without me for a fuller wet run (another fun fact for the expensive daycare – they accepted our application, but made us start paying a few weeks earlier than we wanted to fill their opening, or risk being bumped), and I received several nervous texts from her. First, they overfed Ted because he still seemed fussy after the first few ounces.  “I don’t want them overfeeding him and making our son fat because they’re too lazy to take care of him,” to paraphrase the paranoid parent.  Then, they utilized a pacifier to pacify him, as if that’s what it’s intended to do.  “I don’t want them overusing a pacifier and making him addicted to it because they’re too lazy…” or something to that effect.  So, to recap, instead of having a bunch of crying babies leading Sai to question if they were taking care of said crybabies, the daycare center was now being questioned for quickly dealing with a crying baby.  Kind of seems like they can’t win, doesn’t it?  Welcome to my world.

That evening, Sai asked again about hiring someone to come to our home to take care of Teddy. She suggested going back to the other home daycare provider.  I told her to trust the well-regarded place that takes care of her coworkers’ kids, at least enough to try them out for a few months.  Our son is generally pretty mellow (unlike his mommy), so I believe he’ll adjust quickly.  I don’t like her idea of keeping him locked up in a bubble, isolated from the world, just because his mommy can’t CTFD.  So we’ll see.  I just hope they can teach the kid well, since the price of admission is more than my out of state college tuition, room and board were (granted that was a while ago), so Teddy’s college fund is going to pre-K expenses.

[After a few weeks (months) of adjustment, Sai would eventually come to realize that the caregivers for our angel were not devils. They give good care to Teddy.]

 

IN-LAWS

Sai’s parents left us with a month to deal with Teddy without them, before we could utilize the overpriced services of a daycare center. How selfish.  How self-sufficient do they think we are?  Their two-month stay was definitely helpful, and they got to experience all of the impersonal moments of a newborn before he could focus and recognize voices and smile and laugh on purpose.  But it’s better than nothing.  Teddy was still cute, though now he is cute and semi-cognizant.  Sai’s mother, also known as Teddy’s yai (sp?) would sing soothing melodies to calm him down, or chant some weird voodoo-sounding spell to distract him from whatever maladies he seemed to suffer.  Sai’s father, aka Teddy’s da (sp?) would watch us frantically handle the tiny creature during his early weeks, while otherwise working hard to keep our recliner in action and TV in steady use.  He reminded me a lot of my father, aka Teddy’s poo (sp?).  I think it’s really shitty that the Thai name for the father’s side grandfather is poo, but that’s what they told me.  Or maybe the wife and in-laws really think my dad’s a piece of crap.  Everyone’s entitled to an opinion, but please, try some subtlety!

Her parents helped a lot with cooking and cleaning, as well as minding Teddy so that we could eat. They kept Sai from killing me, which was greatly appreciated.  My biggest complaint was that in the middle of the night, when Sai would send me searching the house for something, I’d have to put pants and a shirt on rather than prancing around in my underwear.  (I didn’t want them to notice how fat I’d gotten during the pregnancy – you know, in sympathy for Sai).  The one time I forewent this habit, when Teddy was particularly fussy, at 3 a.m. I decided that he wanted to use the swing downstairs.  And surely no one else would be up at such an ungodly hour.  Sure enough, as I came down the stairs sans clothes, da stood up to see nearly naked me carrying the screaming baby to the swing.  I dropped Teddy onto the swing, and dropped myself onto the nearby couch, figuring I’d done everything I could by that point, and it was up to our little gift from god to take it from there.  Instead, grandpa (not to be confused with grandpoo) picked up my son and took him upstairs to the guest room, where both of Sai’s parents did their best to calm the raging beast for the better part of the next hour.  The handoff was unintentional, but I gratefully took it to mean that I could go back to bed.  I told Sai to retrieve Theodore before her parents gave up or went mad.  They did some magic trick to lull him to sleep, or the kid’s energy finally was exhausted after such a long bout of tears, and the babe was back to us before dawn.

My other complaint is that they commandeered my TV. At one time, we had three televisions in the house, before giving away two of them which were never used.  Now that her father did his best impression of my father in watching endless hours of mindless TV, it meant that I couldn’t watch my own endless hours of different mindless TV.  Guests get privileges such as first choice of which Thai show to watch on YouTube.

After two months of living with us, our guests / slaves decided they’d had enough, and headed back to the opposite side of the planet. There they could get some decent sleep, better Thai food, and more Asian language channels on the TV.  They are definitely missed!

 

THE SNEEZE

Roughly a year ago in Croatia, I confess to laughing in the wet face of a nemesis when he sneezed and splashed himself in the face with a glass of orange juice (in your face, you orange-faced candidate supporter!), so I guess it was karma balancing itself when my own untimely sneeze would haunt my dreams. For once (and only once), I had the Teddy bear rocked to sleep via the rocking chair in his nursery, and laid the boy to bed in his crib.  All was well, as I sat and waited to ensure that the sleep would stick.  I sipped a beer and read my Kindle, enjoying this rare calm, when a tingling sensation in my nose told me that a sneeze was imminent.  Unable to stifle it, the loud sternutation (had to google a synonym for sneeze) erupted like a clap of thunder, and Teddy answered its call with a shriek of his own to let me know that he was done sleeping for the next few hours.  This was before I learned the magic of sleep songs.

 

TEDDY’S SLEEP SONGS

God bless Amazon Echo. It is the greatest invention since the iPhone, or something.  The Prime Music library houses all of Teddy’s favorite hits, as well as some nighttime lullabies or nature songs that Sai requests.  The Echo Dot in our room (which has become Teddy’s room until he sleeps straight through the night without waking for midnight / early morning feedings) is often more useful than his pacifier for pacifying the restless screamer.

I established a short list of songs that did the trick for calming Teddy. Forget all of the cultural classical music that Sai hoped he’d take to (take that, Mozart; roll over, Beethoven).  Screw those stupid children’s songs and lullabies.  Teddy relaxes to rock.  The song “Darling” by the band Real Estate is a melodic tune that caught my ear when I learned the lead singer wrote it about his embryonic baby.  Sai was similarly carrying Teddy at the time when I first heard it, and both the babe and I still like the song.  Kurt Vile has a couple of chill jams with less personal meaning, but toe-tapping beats that help bounce the boy to sleep.  “Wakin’ on a Pretty Day” and “Pretty Pimpin’” are the two songs of choice (don’t ask me what KV has against the letter G).  Our fourth selection was “Father and Son” by Cat Stevens, which brought a tear to my eye at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy Volume Two.  I aspire to be more like Yondu than Ego in raising Teddy.  Anyway, any one of these songs can reliably be used to rock him to sleep.

Replaying the same four songs over and over became a bit tiresome, so I’ve since expanded the playlist to throw in some other mellow ditties, such as “Into the Mystic” (Van Morrison), “New Slang” (The Shins), “Yellow” (Coldplay), “Here Comes the Sun” (Beatles), “What a Good Boy” (Barenaked Ladies), “Three Little Birds” (Bob Marley), “Waiting for My Real Life to Begin” (Colin Hay), and “Start A War” (The National), among others. No matter which song I play though, as soon as Sai enters the room, she requests a change in tune.  Our battle for the musical soul of our son has already begun.  The only one we can agree on is Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”, but this is because we both sing it completely off-key while reading Teddy a book of the same name.

 

FLIPPING TURTLES

As Teddy approaches an age where he can not only tolerate tummy time (he still usually hates it), but recognizes that it’s the next step towards movement, he will be so much more difficult to manage. Right now, our little bear is like a turtle on its back, flailing arms and legs like useless flippers and tail, unable to move himself beyond sometimes spinning around.  Once he masters flipping over and starts crawling, his world will expand so much farther than a single play mat, and we’ll need to baby-proof the rest of the house.  Immobile Teddy reminds me of the old joke about where to find a dog with no legs – wherever you left him.

In his defense, the smart baby (he does still have a really big head – I think in our prenatal efforts to avoid the Zika Virus, he somehow ended up with Suriv Akiz) has his own games he plays with us to pay us back for laughing at him. During our first attempts to feed him foods not from his mommy’s boobs, and subsequent efforts to load him with remedies to fight the myriad maladies picked up from those dirty vector babies at daycare, Teddy developed a brilliant defense mechanism.  Simply waiting until we loaded the food / medicine into his mouth and then spitting it out was too passive.  Instead, Teddy now starts spitting / blowing raspberries before the spoon / syringe even gets to his lips.  He actively rejects our offerings on sight.  He may not be able to run away from us yet, but he can derisively spit at us like… Roberto Alomar?(Let me know if you have a better example).

Teddy also has an impressive trill to his crying. He rolls his Rs during his worst tantrums, which sad as it should be, reminds me a bit of Chewbacca and leads to laughter.  Is that wrong?  Laughing at an adorable, hysterical, helpless turtle baby who sounds like a Wookie?