That sinking feeling

It’s that feeling in your stomach immediately after you pass a police officer who’s looking for speeders using that radar gun.  Immediately you think, ‘Shoot, was I speeding, let me look in the rear view mirror to see if they’re moving….ugh, yup, they’re moving, lights on and coming this way’.  Then, as the police car goes past you to ticket some other hapless soul your body relaxes and the sinking feeling that developed in your stomach disappears.  I bet you also get that sinking feeling when you hear the baby cry in the middle of the night.

It’s a feeling I know that I experience, more so on certain days of the week.  My wife and I split the work involved in caring for Jake.  During the week I take him and on the weekends it’s her work to change diapers, feed him and read The Foot Book by Dr. Seuss, many times a day. 

Either I’m so tired during the weekends that I block it out, or my wife puts our baby on an exercise regime that knocks him out till way past 6:00 AM.  Regardless, it’s Monday morning; 4:15 and I hear crying.  Maybe he’s just talking to himself…I’ll just lay here a moment and see what happens.

The next thing I know it’s 4:30 AM and I hear louder baby cries.  I’ll just walk over to his door and see if he’s still making noise when I get outside his door.  Suddenly it’s as if he’s 16 and trying to be very quiet while talking on the phone late at night, as there is nary a peep from his room.  Sweet, he went back to sleep I naively thought as I crept back to my bed.

As soon as I got back to my bed, his subdued talking erupted into a full on wet diaper howl.  As a parent, it’s interesting how you can decipher that dirty diaper wail from the mere ramblings of a toddler learning to talk isn’t it?  It’s only the cloud of sleep that disguises the emotions of their cries, during the day we can nail those sounds from across the house.

Today Baby Mojo and I went to the pool, had a crawling marathon, read three Dr. Seuss Books and ran two hours of errands.  Morning is my best time, I just prefer to start the parenting clock a bit later than 4:30, but those kids just don’t work on a clock do they?