Giggle boy

I'm reading a rather brutal article about how having children does not increase life happiness in this age of over-anylizing "am I doing this right?" in regard to parenting. Apparently, lots of studies show that now that we can theoretically put off or choose not to have children, we are less satisfied as parents because we had a choice to be parents. If having children wasn't a choice and everyone did it, we'd be happier with the results.

Not sure how I feel about that article, except that I am barely resisting the urge to send it to my friends who, for various reasons, are having trouble having kids. The article goes on to say that overall happiness may be harder to pin down than joyful moments. And that the joyful moments can't be manufactured, they just have to happen. This is true. Before I had my little boy, I don't know how many weekends I ruined by trying to suck all the goodie out of it. I tried too hard.

Last night, I had a moment of extreme frazzledness and also a moment of extreme joy. While I was eating my dinner, and my lap-band husband was finished, the baby woke up and started crying. I asked him to go get him since I was covered in fried chicken grease. I didn't actually use the word "now" and so he didn't hear me thinking it. For some reason right then, Quint's crying drove me absolutely crazy. Just go stop the crying, honey, I need to finish eating. Why hasn't the crying stopped? (Quint was getting his diaper changed and crying because he was still laying down.) For some reason I was frantic to stop the crying and took over the diaper change at extremely high speed. Upright baby - quiet baby. Ahhh. Better. That was probably the worst moment of the evening, and it seemed extreme a the time.

After we went on a walk to get me some endorphins, I made Quint some ice water in his leakable sippy cup. After he had drank a good bit, he started playing with it as usual. Water sprinkling all over the carpet. No biggie. That's one reason why it's not applejuice. For some reason I get the bright idea to sprinkle water at Quint's face - the equivalent of flicking water in his face. He finds this hysterical, no matter if I splash me or him. So we keep doing it until a lot of the carpet is damp, my cleavage is refreshingly cool, and Quint's whole head is wet. The video camera's battery is dead, so I just take a mental video. Very precious moment of hysterically laughing, drenched baby. Sooooo cute at that moment. We went in the next room to find Papa and I sprinkled his face again. More hysterical laughing. Made Papa laugh, too.

OK, so that paid for the extremely annoying crying earlier. We're now, once again, in the positive for baby enjoyment for the day.