Do Babies Dream of Baby Sheep
You know how I said before that it was the waiting for the baby's arrival that was the hardest part? Bollocks! The waiting was the easy bit, as you can see from my new top three list of the hardest things about having a baby, ranked from hardest to easiest...
- The birth. Horrific. Brutal. Savage. Basically like a Saw movie. (Shudders)
- Twenty four hours of a baby crying. Oh! My! God! Please sleep!
- Waiting for an overdue baby.
In fact, as unbearable as it seemed at the time, I actually miss the waiting part now! I mean, we love our baby, we are over the moon, smitten, and very rarely think about selling her on eBay, but I live in a beautiful city, it’s thirty degrees outside and I don't have to go and sit in an office! I miss being able to just take a stroll up to Buda Castle with my favourite wife, pop in to Pest for a bite to eat, or visit one of the city’s many bars or cafes for a sociable drink in the sun.
Maybe I’m just feeling a tad bitter due to the fact that Mila spent yesterday (which incidentally was our third wedding anniversary) screaming at the top of her tiny lungs. FOR TWENTY FOUR FUCKING HOURS! I think she’s maybe going through that phase. You know the one. The phase where the ONLY thing that will stop her crying is to be carried around by her Dad while he sings the entire back catalogue of The Crash Test Dummies to her. The trickiest part of this is that I only know two of The Crash Test Dummies' songs. These being ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’ and ‘Afternoons & Coffeespoons’, and out of these two songs I know a total of eight words from the lyrics, seven of which are in the titles. So, our anniversary evening consisted of me, with wild, bloodshot eyes, wandering around the flat carrying a baby, guessing the entire back catalogue of The Crash Test Dummies.
“She’s asleep honey! Why don’t you try and put her to bed?” my wife says.
I nod and then looking like a man carrying his life's work through a field of land mines, I carefully put my sleeping child to bed. Her peaceful, sleeping head touches the mattress. Her eyes shoot open. She glares at me and she is frantic. She screams. I pick her up.
“Mmm, Mmm, Mmm, Mmm, Mmm, Mmm, Mmm, Mmm, Mmm.”
Repeat until my eyeballs bleed, while I consider if there's any feasible way to put our baby back inside my wife.
One other thing that hopefully one of you experienced parents out there can help shed some light on. Why is it that a baby will sleep through storms, sirens, violent political demonstrations etc, but if you step on to a squeaky floorboard, wide awake! Why!? What is this witchcraft, this black magic! A few days ago we went for a walk with Mila in her buggy. It was some kind of National Hungary Day so there were celebrations all over the city. We’d just managed to get Mila to sleep by walking vigorously over a cobbled street, when up ahead we spot something that terrifies us. A parade of Hungarian bagpipe players coming our way! About fifty of them, all gleefully blowing in to their abhorrent sacks! We've no idea what Hungarians are doing playing the bagpipes, but naturally, we are horrified. We look for an escape route, but it’s no use. We are surrounded. So, with darkness in our hearts we prepare to walk in to the bagpipe playing hell. And...our ridiculous little human didn’t so much as raise an eyelid! Astonishing sleeping skills! We are delighted! We get home, she seems to be in a coma, we put her to bed, step on a floorboard that had just at this moment decided to become squeaky. Eyes shoot open. Scream. We are broken.
“You know our baby?” I ask the wife.
“I know her.” she replies.
“Well, I think she might be a bit of a dick.”
“Don’t say that honey!”
“I’m sorry, but she has screamed for the entirety of our wedding anniversary, only stopping if I sing early 90's, obscure, Canadian rock to her! Not only that, but she seems to time her number two’s for when it’s my turn to change her nappy! You get a little splash of fragrant baby wee, I get stinking baby jalfrezi! What the hell is that about!? Like I said, I think she might be a bit of a dick.”
“She’s not a dick. She doesn’t understand what’s going on. She’s going through something called a leap. She’s just scared.”
“Well, I hope you’re right! She better be scared shitless!”
When we do finally manage to get Mila to sleep I often find myself staring at her, wondering what the devil she’s dreaming about. I mean, what does she know? She knows the inside of my wife’s uterus, she knows that breasts are delicious, and she knows a tiny section of Budapest. She'd be a rubbish 'phone a friend' on Who Wants to be A Millionaire. She probably doesn’t even realise that the United Kingdom recently had a referendum about whether or not to stay in the European Union! Or maybe I’m wrong and she knows a lot more than she’s giving away. Maybe she has been quietly absorbing the world around her over the last nine months from inside my wife.
What the hell is going on inside that tiny head?
Maybe her dreams are vivid and wild. Maybe they go a little something like this…
Flying over the Alps like a fleshy, baby, Ryanair jet
The Even Littler Mermaid (Eat your heart out Nirvana Nevermind cover)
Dancing with pink dancing sheep on the beaches of Kokomo (obviously)
Riding her stuffed dog Rufus through the wild jungles of Mexico
Travelling across a river with her friendly, stuffed, pink, giraffe, Juan Sebastian.
Or maybe she’s just dreaming about my wife’s breasts.