Procrastinet

Fear and Loathing in Park Slope Brooklyn

filed under: Dadditudes

Did you know that ephedrine/pseudoephedrine are used in meth labs to make crank?

I didn't.

Now I do. I was looking into the nature and effects of pseudoephedrine after discovering its ability to cause my not-yet-two-year-old son to stay up all night climbing up walls, tapdancing on the ceiling, and blowing things up with his vicious laser eyebeams.

Last night, a hacking cough was waking Max up every ten minutes or so in evident misery. So I ran out to our local 24 hour drug store and picked from among the wall-sized display of cough elixirs the one that (a) seemed most designed for small children (i.e. a dropper, not a cup), and (b) seemed to offer the most ways to make him feel better.

A nagging voice in the back of my head tried to remind me of an old story I had heard from my Mom, about something horrible that pseudoephedrine had done to me when I was beensy, from which we learned I was intolerant. I ignored it.

So when Max woke up at about midnight, hacking and crying, we dosed him up with baby-style cough suppressant plus expectorant plus here's where we went seriously awry decongestant. Pseudoephedrine.

All was well. Baby sleeping. No coughing. Mommy Daddy sleeping. Good good.

2:30am all no longer well. Baby awake and crying out for something. "Books!" as it happens. "Books a-BOOKS!" Odd request for the wee small hours. Mommy awake and dealing with it, so Daddy back to sleep.

3am - baby being brought into bed. Restless. Trying to sleep but not getting much of anywhere with it. Mommy Daddy no longer sleeping more than fitfully.

3:30 am - baby WIDE AWAKE AND READY TO PARTY. I realize the tactical error of having allowed Lisa to deal with him to this point: it is now MY TURN.

3:40 am - baby and Daddy emerge blinking into the living room, with baby writhing and bouncing and calling for booze, hookers and human adrenal gland. Or maybe just "BOOKS!" and "DORA!" I'm not so clear on it anymore. I plunk him on the floor while I marshall supplies, and he blinks around at the walls in a crazed manner, shouting unrecognizable words at intervals. "JamBO!" he calls. "Wop! BangOOO!"

I have never seen him behave like this.

The next 2.5 hours pass in a haze of debauchery and high living. Finding Nemo and Elmo's World on the tube, baby twanging and thrumming in my arms as I attempt to faint on the couch.

Finally, as he's peering at the closing moments of our 2nd Elmo's World episode through barely-open eyes, I try to inject some control into the evening.

"Buddy?" I say, cautiously. "You wanna go back to your crib, and try to get some more sleep?"

"NO!" he hollers, instantly revved up again. "WATCH ELMO! WATCH ELMO WORLD!"

So at least the speed does some good for his sentence construction.

At this point it's 6 am, which means "Mommy's Turn" has come around again. I take him upstairs - sobbing, weeping, gnashing, as "upstairs" means "away from the tv" - and dump him unceremoniously on Mommy.

As she carries him back down, he's looking at me with hurt and heartbreak and shooting lizards at me out of his eyes.

Apparently he began his "come down" at about 7am and was out by 7:30.

Procrastimom has since confirmed that I tripped hard on some pseudoephedrine when I was four months old, and when she told the Pediatrician that I'd been looking around crazily, like I was hallucinating, the Ped replied "oh, yeah, that's 'cause he was probably hallucinating."

Huzzah.

Posted by rjt at May 23, 2005 02:44 PM