It's Genetic, Boogie-Woogie-Woogie!

Something about the heady mix of my genes and the wifes genes produces infants that basically have two settings: cute, and ticking time bomb. I thought maybe it was just Aidan; after all he's aboy, and they're EXPECTED to emit all kinds of foul odors and emanations, starting at birth and peaking around 25 or so. But Maia is doing the same thing. What the hell...girls aren't even supposed to poop! They just emit puffs of rose-scented dust clouds when they need to go. Right? Anyway, Maia basically had me doing the Daddy Decathlon.

Mom went to the doc's leaving me with the precocious and entirely too coordinated Aidan, and the sweet but nefarious Maia. She started out on the afore-mentioned "sweet" setting, looking at me while I held her, yawning, and eventually taking a pretty good nap. But when she got up.... yowza. She was hungry, so I had to convince her to take a bottle from me. While she will do it, it takes longer; she inherently senses that my boobs are smaller and entirely ineffective as a food dispensing unit, and sees the bottle as my pathetic attempt to curry her highnesses favor. Maybe it's just me. Regardless, I finally got her almost all fed, when I heard a sound akin to the fabric of space and time being torn asunder. I froze, fervently praying it was just gas-- because Maia has officially entered the stage where she only poops once every 2 to 3 days, and I knew Vesuvius was due to blow. Slowly, I began to realize that it was not, in fact, gas. I really tried to finish feeding her and burp her, but the smell...oh god, the smell... it's indescribable, but imagine what it would smell like if you miked poo, Doritos, and sugar together.

I knew it was bad....but when I checked, I found it as worse than I thought. Poo, all the way up to her neck. Worse, it was a tight fitting onesy, so I was pretty sure I was going to get it on her head as I yanked it off. So I went into lightening mode....off come the pants, down goes the waterproof changing pad, off comes the diaper, down go some transitory sacrificial wipes, swab half to goo off, flip her onto her belly on the clean half of the couch...BOOM! She spits up everywhere, and is now face-down in her own undigested milk. Worse, she gets angry and flips her head, so it's in her HAIR. I keep it together though... I grap a spit-rag, wipe it all off her, hold her up, peel off her onesy inside out, and wipe EVERYTHING like 14 times. Of course, she is screaming by this point, and Aidan is shredding Play-Dough in the other room, but I can't stop to think about it. I half-heartedly try to give her a binkly, fail, and soldier on. I now have an completely naked baby, so KA-POW I wrap her up in a receiving blanket to take her upstairs to finish this battle. I'm up the stairs, almost there, and ZAP!....suddenly the blanket is very warm, and very wet. She has just peed on me. I sigh, but continue. Put her down, wiper her off AGAIN, wrestle a fresh onesy on, and ZING! she pukes all over that one too., And gets the changing pad. I'm reeling now, barely able to keep from just wrapping her in a new blanket and cuddling her until Mom gets back, but I manage to dig deep and get another onesy and outfit on her, as well as a bib.

Finally, we're all clean, and Aidan is being an angel. Just in time too-- as I'm going down the stairs, in walks Mom. The living room looked like the poop fairy had been assassinated in it, but neither of the kids were crying, both of them had all their clothes on, and nothing was on fire. So I think I got an A. If not, screw it, I'm not interested in whatever horrors extra-credit may entail.

One other thing-- we were giving Aidan a bath recently, and as he was getting out he grabbed his junk and proudly proclaimed "I have a new penis!" We both just kind of looked at each other. I did the only thing a father could do at that point. I asked him "Where'd you get it?" Aidan replied "At the purple toy store" (which means Babies R Us). I asked him "And how's that working out for you?", to which he, without missing a beat, said "Good, Daddy.". Then he went about his business.

So, instead of an imaginary friend, my son has an imaginary new penis. Man, those early school years are going to be really, really interesting.

Babies vs Toddlers

It still amazes me how different Maia is from Aidan. I man, granted there is the whole boy/girl thing, but beyond that.... Aidan almost never spit up. And if he did, it was usually because he had on the sweater he apparently hated and was trying to befoul it so we would change him. Maia, on the other hand, spits up almost every time she's fed. And at intervals between. The docs say she's a "content" spitter, because it doesn't cause her pain and she's gaining weight fine. And I can vouch for it-- she's very nonchalant when she snot-rockets half-digested milk out of her nose, accompanied of course by the mouth ooze volcano effect. It's almost like a magic trick, because I can assure you, were that happening to me, I would be decidedly more upset. But to be fair, if it were me I'm sure it would smell a lot worse given my dietary preferences.

Another difference is that their sleeping styles. Aidan refused to sleep unless we put him in the Neglect-o-Matic swing, and pretty much despised the sling we tried with him. Maia, on the other hand, prefers to sleep on her stomach (and before I get all the baby experts writing letters and burning bassinets on my front lawn, let me assure you we only let her sleep on her stomach if she's sleeping on us, not in her crib) and will happily lapse into a coma about 2 seconds after she gets put in her baby sling. I can only hope this means she sleeps better as a big kid than Aidan, who apparently will have a brilliant career as a paperboy since he's up at ungodly hours of the morning anyway.

Any new benchmarks this week? Well, Maia had her first, second, and third official diaper blowouts (I still can't get over how they can crap all the way op to their NECKS). She also, as a consequence of the former, had her first tub bath. Which, in turn, led to her (and our, since Aidan to date still hasn't done this) first official tub-poo flotilla. Which, by the way, really really REALLY sucks to clean up. It's kinda like trying to wash cous-cous down the drain... at this point it's so granular that the weight of the water pushes it out of the way, and I ended up with the baby poo version of sand art. And, of course, Aidan thought this was pretty cool, so in went the rubber duckie.

As for Aidan, well, his library of bastardized showtunes and much loved standards continues to grow unabated. This week, he inexplicably began singing Jingle Bells again, but changed the words to "What fun it is to ride in daddy's car". He's also apparently decided he is a dinosaur and wants to eat meat all the time. Specifically, he wants meatballs. Wait, sorry, he wants meatBOBS. And meatloaf, which happily I can make well. (By the way, I know my wife's mom is reading this-- I gotta tell you, your daughter makes meatbobs that could make Emeril jealous.) So, now Aidan thinks that there's bread, and "different bread", by which he means meatloaf, since that's how we slice it. I have definitely screwed this kid up for life. He's very binary... there are a lot of things for him that follow that formula. Another example: He eats waffles almost every day for breakfast. One day I made cinnamon buns. And thus:

"Aidan, look! I made cinnamon buns."
"I want waffles."
"But these are a special treat! They're cinnamon buns."
*pauses, thinks*
"Those different waffles. I like them."

Now he asks for them that way. He's also trying to operate our electronics....and get this... he's trying to put DVDs in our player. What does he call it, you might ask? Why, the ABCD player, of course. For her part, Maia is developing a look that very clearly denotes skepticism, which she uses anytime Aidan talks to her. Which is probably for the best, as I suspect he will continue the long Montross male tradition of creating ridiculous names and explanations for things they don't fully understand. And she, like her mother, will happily ignore his ridiculous statements and love him anyway.

See? Everybody wins. At least, until he tries to get her to believe Sasquatch was the one who lost her favorite CD. Even I never pulled that one off successfully.