The Bottle Gymnastics

Just when I think we’ve hit our parenting stride, Ezran winks and says “hold my milk.”  His latest passion?  Winning gold at bottle gymnastics. 

I sent my wife off on a romantic sunset boat tour yesterday afternoon—romantic both for the scenery and the lack of her husband vomiting profusely off the side of the boat—so it was Ez and me hanging out once again.  We approached bedtime much like a marathon runner at the 26-mile mark: tired, chafed, and covered in bodily fluids.  But the end was in sight, just a bottle standing between our precious little tornado and blissful sleep.

If you need to know one thing about Ezran, it should be his obsession with food.  The boy acts like he’s never eaten before every. single. time. he sees something vaguely approaching edible.  This has been a boon for most of his life as it means he’s never had an issue taking a bottle, so feedings have been relatively simple.  Ezran has since reconsidered this.  Not the food obsession, no, just the serenity a simple bottle feed experience produces in his sleep-deprived parents.

We settled into the usual position and things started easily enough.  His mouth gaped open like a carp, I plugged the bottle in, and away we went.  I took a deep breath and let it out, easing into what I knew would be five to ten minutes of peace, when the boy in my arms decided he wasn’t done being a carp and tried to fling his body in seven directions at once.  I managed to hold on, but in the midst of the chaos the bottle slipped from his lips.

Ezran was displeased.

After silencing the rage-induced shriek with the reinsertion of the bottle into his maw of unending hunger, I tried once more to find that oft sought but seldom grasped tranquility all participants of parenthood crave.  This, Ezran decided, was the perfect time to practice his vault.  He thrust both heels into me and launched himself like the breaching whale my wife happened to see at roughly the same time.  Our son, not recognizing the poetry of the moment, released another screech of frustration that I could not rotate my arm 180 degrees to both keep the bottle in his mouth and maintain a grip on him as he flipped through the air.

This continued for the rest of the feeding, a battle of wills between parent and child that I pray does not foretell too much of what the future holds.  Though if he brings back Olympic gold one day, I’ll happily pat myself on the back for training him so well in his youth.

Writing continues apace!  I’ve finished my initial triage of major, substantial, and minor issues, coming out to a whopping 95.  I’m sure many of those will branch into further issues as I address them, making it a Herculean task as I slay the hydra’s multiplying heads.  But address them I shall as that’s the next step in my editing process.  It’s good to go from identifying to fixing—easier to feel the forward progress that way.