Today is a good day. It is a beautiful day. Look at the sky. Look how spectacularly grey it is. And that mould on your bathroom ceiling? It has a tint and texture that Michelangelo himself couldn’t replicate. And you, reader, you look radiant too, all unwashed and death-breathed and hungover. Yes, today is a good day. Today, I can achieve anything.
Because last night I slept for five hours. Five hours. Five whole hours in bed, next to my wife. At no point during those five hours did I have to change a nappy, or clomp around a hallway in my pants pointlessly humming lullaby fragments into a tiny black hole of noise and fury.
At no point during those five hours was I slumped on a sofa in an excruciating CIA stress position that I daren’t decontort myself from because it’d wake my baby. No, I was in bed. For five glorious hours. My teeth weren’t even vibrating this morning. That’s how rested I feel.
This, as you may have grasped, is a breakthrough. Thanks to my son’s determination to never sleep by himself, the last fortnight has been an endless heavy-limbed fever dream of faraway stares and spontaneous unconsciousness. My wife and I have been communicating exclusively in involuntary eye-twitches. Things got so bad that I saw it lasting for ever. I saw myself 20 years from now, driving to my son’s university every evening to absent-mindedly jiggle his massive adult body to sleep while I begrudgingly watched crap films on Netflix.
But we did it. By hook or by crook, we finally managed to get the boy to sleep. Our secret? Simple. We just panic-bought every bullshit snake-oil sleep-aid we could find on the internet, in the desperate hope that one of them would work. Many, inevitably, did not. The widely recommended DVD we ordered turned out to be a creepy pseudo-Scientologist parade of weird adults and unhappy-looking children, and we ritually destroyed it the second it was over. The miracle-cure swaddle blankets we bought? They may as well have been made out of soggy tissue paper for all the good they did.
But then came the Poddle Pod. A sort of haemorrhoid pillow that fools children into thinking they’re being cuddled, the Poddle Pod has – for the first time – provided us with somewhere to put him down during the day. That, alongside the three-walled bedside cot we rented purely to trick him into thinking he was sleeping with us, seems to have performed an actual miracle. From 10pm to 3am last night, I got to feel slightly human again.
And now I feel like I can take on the world. Dirty nappy? Today I could undress, undo, wipe, dispose, dry, fasten, re-dress, swaddle and cuddle in a single fluid motion, like a master teppanyaki chef. Crying tantrum? Give me a blanket, a standard lamp, a boiling kettle and about three square feet of floorspace and I’ll hand you back a baby that’s as docile and contented as a wagyu cow. And don’t even get me started on the crap I could perform one-handed today. It’d blow your mind.
I’ve got this. It took a few weeks, but those five wonderful hours have convinced me that I’ve actually got this. So long as my son never soils himself or gets ill or hungry or grows or starts teething, I’ll never have another sleepless night again. That doesn’t sound too unrealistic, does it?
