Like some strange haunting, I’ve become fully inflicted with Phantom Crying Neurosis (PCN). I hear baby Jack crying even when he’s blissfully under the spell of slumber. It’s like a prerecorded MP3 tucked into the tiny folds of my brain that gets randomly inserted into the playlist of life. Or like a bad pop song that you just can’t shake. Sometimes I hear the track playing all by itself, and instinctively I go marching into the babies room only to find the baby fast asleep. Sometimes I call out to the wife, “What’s up with the baby?” And she replies: “Nothing, idiot stick! He’s asleep. Now quit bothering me, I’m tying to bulk order strapless dresses from nordstroms.com while I still got all this extra cleavage.”
And so it goes. The worst is when there are other noises about the house like the dishwasher, washing machine, or the television. If any one of those devices is churning out sounds, then it’s a good bet my ears will pick up a frequency somewhere in there and turn it into a full blown “someone is boiling our baby in hot oil” melt down.
I’m not going completely mad. However, I might be projecting. You see, yesterday, there were three confirmed episodes where the kid began crying whilst asleep (visual confirmation was obtained through numerous red bars on baby monitor). Yet when the parents approached the crib, the kid had returned to calm and was totally sacked out. Did he have a bad dream? Do babies even have nightmares? Perhaps the answer is much simpler and instead of infant night terrors – that I can only suspect would involve being attacked by giant vanilla scented soothie pacifiers – he simply had to fart.