My husband is obsessed with our son's cock. No, really. First he was gravely concerned about the circumcision because it was performed on a Monday, and we all know Mondays suck ass. Since it was performed, it's been a festival of him fretting over the healing process. If I had a buck for every time he asked, "Does this look okay to you?" I'd be buying myself a half day at the spa right now. And now, 9 days after my son made a covenant with god, or at least his pediatrician, things went south. Or at least, they went south in that part of my husband's mind dedicated to preserving as much of the sanctity of the snarklet penis lest his manhood be at all comprimised.
Last night was our first attempt at a date night. We had rented the best of monty python, and I picked up sushi when out running errands. Sure enough, I got home and the timing was such it was diaper-and-bottle festival hour. We got him settled down, we had just sat down and started eating when... let the wailing commence. I went up, grabbed the kid, and brought him down to the portable playpen, where he continued to fuss. One ill-phrased comment from the Lad to his hormone addled spouse later, and he had 2 crying family members on his hands. Some calming and soothing later, and the lad decided to try changing the kid's diaper. Where lo, he discovered that one side of the Wee Manhood was looking red and angry near where the ring is still attached from the plastibell they use in circumcising these days.
It had been a long time since I'd seen the Lad go into a full on freakout, but boy did he. The snark emitted a shriek so high and shrill that it spiked the alarm lights on the baby monitor by me, and I went charging upstairs to find a husband who was already mentally running through scenarios in which the snark Loses His Penis Entirely, and he started yelling at me to call the hospital. No amount of rational discussion was working, as visions of desperate reconstructive surgery in Sweden were dancing through his head. Add into this that the lad had consumed no breakfast, no lunch, and had precisely one piece of dinner (a lovely maguro) in him, and you've got a recipe for incogent disaster. Snapping at him that if he didn't calm the fuck down and stop yelling at me, I'd be spending the night at a hotel and he could deal with the kid solo was my next brilliant move. Usually this sort of thing is the equivalent of a giant neon sign proclaiming 'you are being an asshole!' and he snaps out of it, but his crazed worse case scenario we'll be calling him Snarklette and in 40 years he'll be on a Discovery channel show about gender disorders mental state, it was highly inefffective.
So off we went to the ER- and let me say, thank god this happened here and not in Chicago, where we'd still be sitting in chairs right about now. We were literally being seen by a nurse in under 10 minutes. On the way over there, the lad, having calmed due to the snark snoring happily in his car seat- and you know, if one's cock is about to detach due to a horrible infection, a little ride in the car would not be enough to soothe one to slumber- offered that if I wanted to stay at a hotel that night it wouldn't be a bad idea, I could sleep the night through. I allowed as how I wouldn't be staying at a hotel, and when we were ensconced in a room at the ER we had it out about his freakout, and we were all good. And the snark, of course, kept sleeping. The child who had emitted a shriek that even Jamie Lee Curtis would have been envious of slept through being undressed, 2 different nurses flipping his little sad package this way and that looking at it, and having a thermometer shoved up his ass. At this point, the Lad began apologizing to me about the $75 copay we'd just had to pony up because clearly, newborn cocks are supposed to be angry and red and look like the STD flashcards student health had up on the walls to encourage condom use.
It turns out this is, in fact, completely normal and is what it should look like as the ring comes loose and free, and it- the ring, not the tiny sad angry manhood- will fall off in a day or two, and in the meantime it's sore and raw and will cause him high shrieky pain when he has a really really wet diaper. The doctor managed to largely keep the 'you people are nuts' look off of his face, and we all agreed that a photo series instead of just a before and after of what this is supposed to look like would have been, say, useful. As I said to the lad, my people have been doing this for thousands of years and in far less sanitary conditions, it's all good. At this, the doctor excused himself, slid the door to our room closed, and went and laughed himself silly.
I am sorely, sorely tempted to, er, save the ring when it does drop off, and present it taped to a card to the lad, but I don't think I should joke about our son's penis with him. "Do you remember the time you thought his dick was about to fall off?" is not the kind of fond baby remembrance we're supposed to have.
Posted by chicagowench at May 08, 2003 10:53 AM
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