the crankiest birthday of all

Ben, I'm not going to blow smoke up your butt. You were extremely difficult to handle today. There was a moment when you were flipping out in your crib, tired but unwilling to sleep, that I considered downing the rest of a three-month-old bottle of wine just to get through the rest of the day. This was around 2pm on a Thursday, mind you. I remember when you were only a couple of months old, and I thought, just wait until he's six months old; he's going to be so much happier. He'll be able to distract himself and play and smile. True, you do this more than you used to, and you have more good days, but on your bad days, you really kick my ass. You didn't want to do anything today. You didn't want to eat, you didn't want to sleep, you didn't want to watch your Baby Einstein dvd, you didn't want to play. You're neither constipated nor hungry. No rash. No fever. You were just being a butthead.

I made the mistake of preparing your bath but not having your pjs ready to go, so that when you got out of the bath, screaming and tearing the glasses from my face, you writhed as, my heart racing, I struggled to find matching pajamas. Our dryer doesn't work, so I put you in a strange outfit. The pants, a hand-me-down from your 2-year-old uncle, had little folds at the bottom, and I covered your bare feet with them. Exhausted from the day, I read you a Good Night Moon and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom--the only time that you stopped squirming--and I noticed your pink little toes poking out from the folds of the pants. I started laughing, and I couldn't stop. For some reason it was so funny, suddenly, that some days you can be so annoying and then your toes poke out and it's cute and hilarious. I used to have a cat named Spanky McFarlan who scratched the litter box for 30 minutes at a time and pissed all over everything. I got Spanky adopted before we moved to New York, and I never felt bad about it or missed him. But you, you Ben, you're the kind of annoying I love, and I won't ever let you go. Happy seven months.