Part 1
This week has had some parenting failure, on our part. I started writing, and pretty quickly realized that I couldn’t fit it all in one blog. How sad is that?! So this is the 1st part of the series.
We’ve had this baby for nearly 7 months now, and for the most part, we’ve got a pretty good routine down on caring for her, feeding her, changing her, getting her dressed, getting her bathed, traveling with her, etc. We are normally a well oiled machine. Normally.
Not to mention the fact that my wife has had kids for 13 years now, and also owned her own daycare for 7 years. Although taking care of the kids is a fairly new adventure for me, it is certainly not a foreign thing to her. It’s second nature.
However, sometimes, things just don’t go as planned. This week has had some of those moments, where you just go, “What the HELL”?! I’ll try to summarize.
Let’s just start with Sunday. We are headed home from NE Oklahoma after visiting friends and family. We get packed, although not as organized as I’d prefer. In the truck we go. We get about 25 miles when we get a text telling us we forgot Gracee’s formula and cereal at April’s moms house. Ok. We can handle that. No problem.
We stop at Dollar General. April goes in, buys formula, and walks out. Forgets the cereal, we realize about 30 miles later. I ridicule her a little. “How could you remember one and not the other??? Hahaha ding dong”. Or something like that. We usually put some cereal in Gracee’s bottles, and she freakin’ loves it. She almost won’t even drink regular formula without it. But, we’ll manage. We’ve got cereal at home. Next.
Then, later, as we are driving down the turnpike, the smell of a 6 day dead water buffalo wafts through the cab of the truck, and it’s quite apparent to EVERYONE that our little princess had laid an egg. Well….I’m like most guys. I had a destination in mind. I was making good time, and I didn’t wanna stop. So I told April to climb in the back and change the diaper in the truck. Made sense, right? Don’t judge me. You’ve probably done it, too.
April grabs the diaper bag, climbs in the back, starts the changing process, only to find, there were no diapers in the diaper bag. I left 3 of them out of the bag, laying on a table in the house. Ugh. Ok.
I whip the truck over on the side of the turnpike, jump out and start rummaging through our packed things in the bed of the truck, as 18 wheelers fly by me from 2′ away, and find some diapers. Jump back in the truck, hand them to April in the backseat, and get back on the road.
She gets the diaper off, and it’s FULL. Opens up the box of wipes….and it’s EMPTY. We are out. Oops. Damn it. That’s my bad. Ok, now we are really in a jam. We’ve got a huge poopy diaper, a baby butt covered in guacamole, and no way to clean it off. Ok. Improvise. We’ve got some Arby’s napkins. We’ve got a bottle of water. Boom. MacGyver Butt Wipes. But not before Gracee started wriggling her little chunky butt all around, and got poop all over moms sweatshirt. But, problem solved. We just need to get home, now. We’ve got diapers, wipes, and cereal there. We’ll be fine.
We made it home! Yay! As I’m getting Gracee out of her carrier/car seat, in the bedroom, the seat rocks forward and the handle cracks her in the top of of her little baby noggin, pissing her off ROYALLY.
She displays her dissatisfaction by screaming at me for a solid 10 minutes. I make her a cereal bottle, as a peace offering, and April feeds it to her. That bottle used up all the cereal that we had, though, so I’m gonna need to go to the store and get some more. Well, it’s pouring rain outside, but Daddy’s gotta make another Dollar General run, to get some cereal.
I run out to the truck, get drenched, drive to the store, run inside the store, get more drenched, grab some formula, buy it, run back out to the truck, get drenched, drive home, run into the house, get drenched, hand the formula to April, who then promptly says, “ok….where’s the cereal”??!
Ok. I bought formula. Not cereal. Son of a bitch. We have a ton of formula. Gracee wants cereal. She NEEDS cereal.
I run back out to the truck, got drenched again, drive to the store, run inside, got drenched again, bought some mother friggin’ CEREAL, ran BACK to the truck again, got drenched AGAIN, drove back home, ran back in the house AGAIN, got drenched AGAIN, made Gracee a stupid cereal bottle, and gave it to April to feed her.
Then I drank 3 beers. It’s only SUNDAY, y’all…