TMASTFP

Dear Mr. Baby:

Lately you've been a generally fun guy to hang around with.  Forgotten are what I now refer to as the Dark Times - the days of whistling the repetitive chords of the Mexican Hat Dance and lunging deeply, painfully, training-for-Olympian-feats-of-strength-ly so that you would sleep - attached to me like a soft, easily irritated leech - for just twenty minutes for the love of God.   Gone are the bleary nights and mornings and who knows if it's day or night-ings, staring emptily at the cheese grater and considering the pros and cons of rubbing it against my unfathomably itchy eyeball.  No, since you rounded the big four months, we've been relaxing, taking naps, petting the dog, removing fistfulls of his hair from your incredibly strong little baby fists, reading Goodnight Moon over and over and over again to your ever-renewed interest and surprise.  Sure, you have been a bit drooly, and you still don't contribute much the household economy or clean anything up, but your soft fuzzy baldness and effervescent bum, your spontaneous, toothless grinning and genuine, charming appreciation of the well-loved children's song, Wheels on The Bus (provided that you actually go up-and-down and swish-swish-swish) more than make up for your apathy toward cleanliness and order.  What a lovely baby, I have been thinking, as you gently gum my nose and make tiny, stinky farts while compiling one of your accidental pseudo-phrases, like aaaaaay nooooo or daaahg pyooo or my personal favourite, ooooooo shhhhhhhhht. 

Then, one night, as we were all sleeping soundly in the placid tranquility of this peaceful dynasty, you awoke as you often do to babble incoherently but adorably into the air with soft little gurgles and round coos before drifting predictably back to sleep. 

And then for for no apparent, logical, imaginable, or justifiable reason, instead of going back to sleep, you began to emit The Most Annoying Sound on The Fucking Planet. 

What's so annoying about The Most Annoying Sound on The Fucking Planet?  Oh, Mr. Baby, I don't know, really.  It's the frequency, in part, up there in that provoking, exasperating octave reserved for smoke detectors and Mariah Carey's ego.  It's the boundless, operatic lung capacity you apparently possess that allows you to sustain The Most Annoying Sound on The Fucking Planet for minutes that seem like tiny days - tiny, grating, irritating days.  It's definitely something about the ridiculous, physically impossible volume you're cranked up to.  It's the way you are so expressively panicked- or distressed- or angry-sounding in your articulation of this sound, sending everyone scurrying around the house searching for the source of your discomfort or excruciating pain or existential torment only to discover, again and again, that you have no problem, no problem whatsoever.  There's nothing you want, there's nothing we can do, legally or ethically, to shut you up.  You're just shrieking, delightedly.  Just emitting this sound - this horrible, horrible sound Mr. Baby - for absolutely no fucking reason at all. 

You're new on the scene and haven't, as such, had time to sort this out for yourself.  But when people begin moving their lips in the shapes of the numbers one through ten, or quietly whispering things like, "My patience is a delicate white flower in a garden, and I am watering it with a can, in a quiet garden...'' with noticeable frequency around you, you have, Mr. Baby, probably stepped over the line.  And so it's nice that you can make The Most Annoying Sound on The Fucking Planet, and I promise to put it to good use someday.  Maybe I'll need a window broken or want to interrogate someone or just be really mean to some bats.  Maybe someday I'll look back fondly at this time, and your dad and I will say to each other, hey remember when Mr. Baby started making The Most Annoying Sound on The Fucking Planet for five minutes at a time for no reason and there was nothing you could do to turn it off and we started to have migraines from it because the capillaries in our brains were actually bursting?  I wish we could hear that again. 

But for now, little dude, let's just turn it off.