i showed her my dictionary to show the words that I know and how loquacious i can be

by mg at 04:14 PM on December 21, 2004

I’m really looking forward to the holidays, if only for a chance to sleep in late.

Work has been especially stressful the past couple weeks, as one project launches and another enters development, and everyone is trying to pass the buck before everybody else leaves the office for the rest of the year.

My home life has been stressful as well, as we are trying to Furber-ize Frances. No, it isn’t anything mean, at least not intentionally. In the early months of a child’s life, you can’t really spoil them enough. Not enough love, not enough food, not enough holding. If they start crying, for whatever the reason, you satisfy that need.

But at some point, around 6 months, you have to start letting let them comfort themselves when they are upset. If they start crying, unless it is a dire need, then you have to just let them cry.

One of the myriad ways people suggest to do that is the Furber Method. Using this method, when your baby cries, instead of picking her up, you comfort her in her crib until she calms down, and then you leave. Invariably, your kid will immediately start to cry again. When they do, and they always do, you have to wait five minutes before going in to comfort her again. And then you have to wait ten minutes. And then fifteen.

The next night you wait six or seven minutes, and then 12 or 14, etc. Until eventually your kid starts being able to get herself back to sleep without your help, or her head spins around 360 degrees and she shoots pea soup out of her mouth.

Now, nature has made it impossible to hear a baby crying without compelling the hearer to want to take action, so it is difficult to sit there and listen to any child cry, but especially so your own. What makes it doubly difficult (or would that be triply now) is that we live in a one-bedroom apartment, and the kid sleeps about 3 feet away from us.

So, suffice it to say that the Furberizing isn’t going great, and I’m going on no sleep people. No sleep.

Between parenthood and work, I’ve really been running on fumes, and when that happens, I start to lose brainpower. I’m a reasonably intelligent person with an above-average (at worse) vocabulary, but when I’m tired I start to forget even the simplest of words. I either have to stand there with a dumb look on my face as a search for the right word, or just give the definition of the word and hope people know what the hell I'm talking about. For example:

Yesterday was the first snow of the season and it really bummed me out to wake up in the morning and have to scrape snow off the windshield of my… wheeled transportation machine.

The other thing that happens when I lose sleep is I lose all fine motor function. For example, I got a cup of soup for lunch today. Apparently I filled the cup a little too full, because as I fumbled to open the top of it back at my desk, a fair amount of Southern Style Sausage and Rice squirted out on my shirt and pants, like if you’d stepped on a tube of toothpaste.

And that is why I’m happy for the holidays, so I can get some sleep and get back to my normal verbose and dexterous self.