I will not eat full-grain mustard again

Photo by Cyn­thia Blue

We haven’t hit the sweet spot yet where Kai sleeps through a night. He made 5 hours for two nights this week, but we’re now resigned to them being flukes.

Maybe he’s not eat­ing enough and sleep­ing too much dur­ing the day, we’re not sure. And going on gues­ti­mates based on books and the Con­fine­ment Nanny’s advice can be a bit tir­ing because all you want to do is try to get a few hours’ unbro­ken sleep.

Kai is too young to know that he needs sleep, and although it makes com­plete sense to us that he shouldn’t be over-stimulated lest he can’t lull him­self to sleep, our son can find all sorts of ways to drive him­self batty — he starts bab­bling once there are toys in his line of sight. You take away his toys, he stares at the pat­terns on his cot. You turn out the lights, he cries until you turn them back on, so that he can stare at the pat­terns on his cot.

We are grate­ful we haven’t yet found Murphy’s Law of Dia­per Change to be irrefutable — he keeps his dia­pers clean for at least 2 min­utes after I change them, but all new and prospec­tive par­ents need to know that there are duties that include exam­in­ing your baby’s poop, because the colour and tex­ture of your baby’s fae­ces is one of the signs of whether your child is ill or not.

Because of this, Naomi’s and my meal­time con­ver­sa­tions have evolved. Whereas once we might have talked about how stu­pid local tv pro­grams are, now she asks while I’m tuck­ing into lunch, “Do you find his poop a bit runny?”

And I might answer, “yes, but isn’t it always like that?”

To which she’ll say, “not that runny”.

And I’ll ask, “then what’s it sup­posed to look like?”

And she’ll say, “like full-grain mus­tard, you know?“