Stay at Home "Dad"

Getting babies to their diaper caddies is SRS BZNS!

I'm a week into my new assignment as The Contrarian's stay-at-home caregiver. Technically it's only five hours a day, four days a week, so I guess I'm not quite officially a stay at home anything, but his psychic power of contradiction makes even five hours a difficult enough shift. ("There, now your diaper is changed, and you're all dry." "I am not!")

After a week and a half of this, only one thing is certain:

I must personally punch everyone in the face who ever said I would totally be able to write because babies "just sleep."

First of all, the only time The Contrarian "just sleeps" is when he is in a carrier and I am walking around, but it's like a very slow version of the movie Speed. If I drop below .55 miles per hour, he explodes...in tears. And even if he is asleep, it's not like he schedules sleep in two hour chunks at a stretch right after lunch and is very polite about letting me work. First he needs food, then changing, then music, then a carrier walk. I work for forty-five minutes to get his every need taken care of, and then he finally settles down to sleep. If I'm lucky I can do a transfer of him from the carrier to a sleeper like that golden idol scene in Raiders of the Lost arc, but I often don't even risk it.

                                              The darts would be like metaphors for baby scorn.

Once he's well and truly finally down, I seriously feel like I'm in the "rushed" part of a bank heist movie. ("LAPD response time is seven minutes; empty this vault! Also, Chris the kid will be up in somewhere between seven minutes and an hour...but we have no idea how long.  Hurry up and write a paragraph!! SHNELL!!!")

And if I'm lucky--very, very lucky--I'll be wrapping up an idea when I hear what can only be (based on the smell) the sound of a sewage pipe exploding.

Anyway, this would be a longer update but I'm still working the bugs out of this schedule. And by bugs I mean screaming poop monsters who I love like crazy and would do anything to protect and think the world of, but still with the screaming and the poop.