when calvin's younger brother was little, and awoken in their house of 10 (no. i'm serious.) cantonese members by raucous chatter, he'd announce to his family, "chinese is a loud language!"
UGH! i want to kill my neighbors right now. the thing about babies is they don't know how to fall asleep on their own, so you've got to help them drift off. tonight's routine included patting him to sleep with a pacifier for 20 minutes, silently congratulating myself as i watched my dinner being nuked, hearing him cry, returning to nurse him to sleep while simultaneously swallowing my dinner, and then patting him to sleep humming "you are my sunshine" for another 30 minutes. kind of sweet, right?
let see, then about 10 minutes into his hard earned slumber the landlord, his wife, his daughter and her wedlock brat with the lung capacity of a cockatoo and shrill voice of a hyena (clearly genetic) start screaming what they had for dinner and slamming their doors because everyone should know their honey nut prawns were DAMN GOOD. if it's not that, the other neighbor has not only the craziest dinner parties at 1am, but also knows how to jingle all 700 of her keys when she comes home so it sounds like she's drunk and jingling 700 keys. this is also part of the regular routine.
the thing is, this is shanghai. it's not manhattan, brooklyn, and certainly not san francisco. you can't ask your neighbors politely to be considerate of your baby and expect results. this is a city that our friend katie had to rush her daughter to the er because the furniture was toxic, and no one was that surprised. standards? conscience? hoho, no. actually, after seeing katie's place and thinking her elevator to the apartment was super extravagent, i'm now convinced with kids, it's more a necessity than you think. it's just so depressing that i feel i have to become more and more isolated, tai-tai-ish and paranoid to feel comfortable raising spencer here. i know those things probably would've happened anywhere after becoming a new parent, and there are trade offs, but come on.
god. spencer thrashes about and protests loudly because he's a baby, and is barely 4 months old. what's their excuse?
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