Teething Appears to Suck

So it seems like getting teeth sucks way more than I will ever remember.  

As in, sucks enough to wake you up at 2:00 in the morning (when you're visiting friends) and keep you awake, tossing and turning for 3 hours or so.  Then, when it looks like you're not going to get any sleep, you go for a ride, just to calm everyone down and let some people try and sleep (the host friends and a parent).

But that ain't gonna work, either.  Instead, you're going to hang out until 7:30 a.m. or so, and then finally crash for an hour and a half.

Then, when you get up, you're going to be super friendly and cheerful, ready to visit and have a great time.  This is the exact opposite of how your parents feel, so while one "looks after you" in a zombie-fied state of being, the other one sleeps for a little while longer, to hopefully eliminate some of the whole waking dead thing that's going on.

So. . .  Yeah.  That's what Saturday nights look like sometimes.  But as much as O getting teeth sucks for me and her mom, I can't be all that upset.  Because it seems like it must suck a lot more for her.  And really, there are only 20 of these bad boys coming, and O has four out already.  That's 20%.  We're almost done.

Cripes.  Poor kid.

Guess How Much This Book Bugs Daddy

I know, it's supposed to be a fantastic children's classic.  Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney.  It gets great reviews.  Seriously. . .  Great reviews.  No one is hard on this book.  I think I may have to look into this, and see if anyone is hard on any children's book.  It's cute.  It's a lovely little board book (the version we have) with charming illustrations.  I openly admit that we even have one of those "My Baby's First Years" books based on, and with illustrations from, this book.

But I don't like this book.  I think it's jerky.

I'm not anti-rabbit or anything like that.  I'm just against this story of one-up-manship by a child's father.  Apparently the book can be read with the adult rabbit -- sorry, hare -- as either the mother or the father, but I am a father, so I read it like that.  Either way, no matter how much this poor little kid rabbit tells his father how much he loves him, the father has to come back and go him one better.

"I love you as high as I can reach," says the little guy.  And the father comes back with "And I love you as high as I can reach,"  which, as a larger, taller adult, is higher.  So the adult loves the kid more and feels he has to tell the kid as much.

I'm just kind of put off by the whole "I love you more than you can love me" sort of thing that's going on here.  That, and the length of the names -- Little Nut Brown Hare and Big Nut Brown Hare.  Sorry, that gets a little tiresome for me.  Which might be selfish, but I'm the one reading this thing to my daughter.

So their names are Paul (the big one) and Frank (the little one).  Either way, I kind of feel like Paul's a bit of a jerk, and this (as far as I'm concerned) comes to a jerky finale when Paul waits until Frank is too tired to speak and has fallen asleep, then whispers that he quantitatively loves his child more.

But I digress.

I love my daughter.  With every part of my being.  It's mushy, it sounds cliche.  But it's true.  And I know that my daughter loves me.  And some day, she'll be able to tell me how much she loves me.  And I may or may not love her more than she is capable of loving me, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let her know that.

If my daughter ever says to me that she loves me to the moon, I'm gonna let that one slide.  She wins, hands down.