Of boot camp and drunken monkeys

This morning was the first in which I woke up and officially felt broken. Everything hurts, even my eyeballs. I feel like I'm in boot camp, with a tiny little drill sargeant, who can't really stand on his own and issues his commands in high-pitched gibberish, but still demands absolute respect. "You will respect my author-o-TAY!!!!"

Going to bed last night turned into a 2 and a half hour comedy (or tragedy) event. Aden had been zipping about all day long, and taken one nice long nap in the morning. So we figured that we were in for an easy night. A no-brainer. Right? Wrong!

In hindsight, we made two major tactical errors: 1) Aden took a mini-nap around 4:30, and then 2) we fed him sweet potoato & banana baby food after he woke up. Now, I know that the last one might not seem like such a big deal (it sure didn't to us), but that's when things went really wrong. It was as if the organic hippies who make the food we brought had spiked that stuff with Red Bull. Or PCP. Aden suddenly went manic, alternating between wild bursts of energy and complete exhaustion. We tried every bedtime trick in the book to get him to settle down, from rocking and singing to leaving him in the crib to let him "work it out" (spoiler to the shocking ending: he didn't work it out).

Finally, we entered the final chapter, which shall forever be known as "The Drunken Monkey Incident." Melissa and I were so beat ourselves that we crashed out on the bed with Aden between us, and just watched the comedy carnage. For a solid half hour, Aden did his best impression of a tiny little man on a Jagermeister bender - manically trying to climb up on us, falling on his face, trying to stand but not being able to lift his head off the bed, spouting gibberish at a mile a minute, waving his arms in the air, smacking himself in the face, and generally acting like (to quote Amy from Schwa) he had "flipped his burger." We just looked at each other, mutely shocked at the insane juggernaut our cute little baby had mutated into.

Finally, when he began to slow down (i.e. when the craziness started coming in waves, and it took him a whole ten seconds to begin another spazz attack) Melissa made her move. It was like in an action-hero cop movie, when the protagonists are in a gunfight, hopelessly outnumbered, and they improbably crouch behind a wooden door, letting the bullets whiz by their heads. Melissa was that one hero cop who looks at her goofy, offbeat partner (yeah - that's me) and says, with a steely look in her eye, "Cover me," and goes running out into the firestorm.

Except in this case, she just picked Aden up and rocked him back and forth. Four or five times, Aden tried to spazz out in her arms, but it was a losing battle. Within fifteen minutes, he was slumped out, totally unconcious. We waited, terrified of making a sound, for another five minutes... and then Melissa put him down in his crib, and collapsed on our bed, totally zonked with exhaustion.

(and, while you've all seen him playing with his butt paste [heh, heh- I said butt paste], this particular expression best sums up the general frenzy of the Drunken Monkey. Fear the drunken monkey. Bow before his powerful spazztacity.)