Tuesdays With Murray (Chapter 51)
July 8th, 2008
We’ve decided against letting Em cry-it-out and have instead enrolled in the more passive sleep education course. You see, Em is one of those babies who does not calm down by crying. Instead, crying makes him more and more hysterical until he erupts, spit and other bodily fluids spray out of his mouth, eyes and nose and his head looks like some kind of pierced water ballon. He gags and sometimes it sounds like he’s going to vomit. It’s awful.
Naturally, I have only let it get to this point twice in his life and both times it felt needlessly cruel. I know that it works for some people, but we simply cannot do it. (And we don’t want to.)
And so we’re trying something less aggressive where we’ll sit with him and console him when he needs to be consoled. It’s not yet going according to plan. He still cries because he wants to be picked up. But we have high hopes. (This is all still very new. We’re still reading up on how to do it. I anticipate a long road ahead of us.)
Anyway, on Friday Tobyjoe decided to sit with him and watch him cry as I frantically tried to block it out by cleaning the entire apartment.
Normally I lock Murray in our bedroom whenever I mop because he really likes to be involved. He’s weird. But this time I thought he’d be OK. Plus, I wanted to keep noise and cats as far away from Tobyjoe and Em as possible.
I decided to clean with Murray in tow.
Everything went just fine up until the very end when the entire railroad apartment was wet. That’s when Murray decided it was time to attack.
The next 30 seconds were that of hilarity and I so wish I had them on tape so I could watch them over and over again. And I swear to you, all 30 seconds took place in slow motion. Like, someone actually slowed the rotation of planet Earth just enough for me to thoroughly enjoy what was about to take place. Even the baby’s cries were muted. It was just Murray and me and a slippery apartment.
Murray successfully jumped over the mop, but whenever he touched down on the other side, his feet gave way on the slippery floor and his back legs slipped out from under him, making his entire body skid to the left. In an attempt to correct the sudden momentum, he immediately turned his body to the right, a decision that may have worked had Murray not thought someone (or something) did this to him. He wanted to find the culprit! He jerked his head from one side to the other looking for the invisible prankster. That threw everything off and sent him into a full-force right-hand slide. Still unable to make peace with the slippery floor, and still in search of the guy who pushed him, he just kept sliding, like an out-of-control slalom skier.
This went on for the entire length of our apartment. All I could think was, “PAUSE! PAUSE! STOP! STOP!” and then, “REWIND! REPLAY!” because in my head everything, including my every day life, can be controlled by the DVR. And, oh my God, I love this show!
But I couldn’t pause it so I could show it to Tobyjoe. And I couldn’t rewind it and watch it again. This was live. And it kept happening until he finally hit the wall at the very far end of the apartment.
Time immediately sped up again and the baby’s cries came billowing out of the bedroom once more. And Murray, unfazed, walked directly to the food bowl to refuel because sliding across a wet floor counts as exercise.
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