Happy hour?

I should just change the name of this blog from "Baby Steps," an obvious reference to my lack ofsense of direction and how I should take on this new phase, to just "What the f****am I doing wrong."

Every time I think I have a hang of the whole thing, baby is on a schedule, sleeping through the night and overall happy, he turns around and proves me wrong. He starts waking up in the middle of the night again, or getting fussy for no reason and, lately, celebrating happy hour with a daily hour long meltdown.

Of course I lack intelligence and rational mindset in these moments to realize that baby doesn't think and wonder if he is doing this on purpose, like I wonder if some drivers in the road drive the way they do just to piss me off.

As I walk around the house with him in my arms for the umpteenth hour, my biceps quivering, my vice hoarse from singing and making the shhhh sound, I actually say out loud, "Why are you so upset? You're already in my arms. I didn't put you in the swing. I didn't put you in the crib. You're clean. You're fed. What IS-YOUR-DEAL?"

Then I feel like a terrible mom because baby of course is not doing this on purpose just to piss me off. Baby is upset about something, but what?

When my husband arrives late in the evening from school, he meets a woman falling apart. Baby of course has stopped crying and is sound asleep in my arms, but after three hours of screaming, so husband doesn't understand immediately why I am the one crying like a baby.

I want to get drunk but can't. An emotional eater, I want to eat my own hand, and because we have no food (it's the end of the week and I already ate the entire contents of the refrigerator), I want to do like the baby and start biting the furniture.

That's when it downs on me that baby must be teething.

I tell my patient husband that I don't understand how something so sweet and adorable can turn into a Tasmanian devil by the end of the day. Husband says, "Now you know how I feel about you!"

Of course baby will stop crying and smile, coo and steal my heart long enough so I remember whom I am holding.

I am laying on the couch, arms and legs spread in defeated exhaustion, asking the walls who is this baby and what is wrong with me, while husband places sleeping baby on his crib. Which book am I not reading?

Husband explains that this is how babies are, that ours was actually strange because he never had a real meltdown until now. He has been drooling (I mean, the baby, not the husband), biting his hands and anything he can put his little mouth on, and now the fussing, so husband says we can safely assume that teething has begun and that happy hour will be this way for many unhappy evenings to come.