When your kids tag-team
Tag-teaming used to be a good thing. Remember Tag Team’s awesome song, Whoooomp! (There It Is)? I totally loved that song. Still do.
(Sidenote: I was 10 when the song came out in 1993, and thought the lyrics were actually “Whooomp! Bad ass! Whooomp! Bad ass!”)
And remember tag-teaming in Donkey Kong Country for Super Ninendo? God, Best Friend and I logged MANY hours playing that game on sleepovers, while eating lots of cheese popcorn. She was always DK, and I was always the little monkey (Diddy?). I adored the tag-team feature because I was terrible at video games, and if I got too scared during my turn I could tag Best Friend and she would resume playing the level.
But tag-teaming, I have learned, is not always a good thing.
When you have two kids under two, tag-teaming is a very EVIL thing known as this:
1. Baby A is sleeping.
2. Baby B is awake and crying.
3. You finally soothe Baby B and get them to sleep.
4. Baby A wakes up right on cue.
5. Baby A is awake and crying.
4. You finally soothe Baby A and get them sleep.
6. Oh look! Baby B is crying again.
*weeps*
Darling Husband and I experienced a really bad tag-team on Sunday night. D (23 months) had a slight fever, and screamed for 3.5 hours — stopping whenever Darling Husband or I walked into his room to calm him, and resuming immediately after we walked out. He also tore apart his room, ripped his nightlights out of the wall, stripped his bed and threw everything on the floor. Repeatedly.
It was one of those brutal nights when you and your spouse are arguing over the best way to parent, and no one’s ideas are working, and you are exhausted and annoyed and the infant Tylenol is NOT WORKING and you just want to go outside and sleep in the minivan. Or drive it far, far away.
When D finally (FINALLY) stopped crying and went to sleep — after 3.5 hours — baby C (not quite four weeks old, at the time) woke up. I was crying, too, by that point. Brutal, brutal, brutal.
Now, in the middle of the night when C is crying, I wish with all my might that D won’t hear her and wake up. Particularly not at the exact moment when I have put C back in her bed.
Tag-teaming = the worst! Tell me — have your kids ever tag-teamed you?
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