The New and Improved Hallucinogen is Motherhood. Bring on the Lizard People!

Babe woke up at 4am this morning.
Did I stutter?
No. 4. Four. FOUR.
Ugh.
And not just, stir a little, nurse him back down, kind of awake, like, full crawl up on my chest and begin crowing like a rooster awake. My poor Beard tousled the baby's hair and turned over. He has to be up for work at 6:30, and we all know how shitty it is to be woken up and see you have to start your day in a mere two-ish hours.
So I got up, thinking, I'd be able to re-settle the child better in the living room, and maybe cruise around on Etsy looking for Christmas presents.
Forty five minutes of squirming, fidgeting, fussing, and general chicanery, and then the kid sinks his teeth into a nip and I know, we're done.
It's quarter to five in the morning, and I am strapping my kid into his high chair, nuking a mug of yesterday's coffee, and cutting up chinks of banana.
The dog and cat watch us, bemused. I have no explanation.
I turn on the oven because the kitchen is cold and the gas bill is cheaper than heat.
I watch while Baz demolishes hunks of banana. My coffee clutched between claws of injustice.
I notice a butternut squash on my kitchen table and bung it in the oven.
It will make the house smell good. Oh, and, by the way, if you're still hacking away at your squashes, scooping out seeds and placing them neatly on foil lined trays before baking them, don't.
It's way easier to just peel off the sticker and hurl the whole gourd in. Bake it at a lower temp for a bit longer (like 350 for an hour), and then get it out. Let it cool for twenty minutes and then you can cut it in half with a butterknife, scoop the seeds out with a spoon, and it's ready for whatever you want to do with a butternut squash at five in the morning.
Me?
I mostly want to hurl it at the side of the house in some dramatic display of futility and ignominy, but then I'd have to clean it up.
Or blame it on the teenagers in the apartment upstairs...

Anyway...
So I make pancakes. I do this by throwing a generous scoop of baked squash, an egg yolk, some instant oats, cinnamon, the other half of the banana, and some baking soda into the baby bullet. I blitz the whole thing for a minute while a pan heats on the stove, then I fry the pancakes while the monster in the high chair bangs measuring cups and flings gummy banana bits at me or the dog depending on which of us deserves more derision in that moment.
Pancakes made, I serve a chunked up one to the baby. He hoovers it up with a look of glee. The fresh pot of coffee is done now too, so I pour myself a decent cup. I look at the clock, it's 5:55am.
Fucking hell.

This is the Gonzo Mothering life.

I don't know what I'm doing, and I'll never proclaim otherwise.
Well, maybe when I'm sixty five, and this kid is all grown up and hopefully a semi-functional adult, but by then nobody will be listening to me as I'll be a pink haired, rhinestone wearing retiree with a newly discovered passion for ballroom dancing with partners a third my age.
Also nobody will be reading blogs by then. We'll all be getting information uploaded to the insides out our eyelids, where we have surgically grafted lcd screens so nobody has to look at each other anymore. We can all just lie in bed and watch the world as it is fed to us through the information robots.

Wow...getting up at four in the morning makes me get dark fast.

Can I take a moment just to say too, that I am in fact a morning person?

I actually am at my best about two hours after wake up?
I can read whole paragraphs and understand them. I can sometimes string words into full sentences. Two hours after I get up I am raring to go.

I tend to unravel the later it gets.

Today for instance, around six o'clock, I'll be in a corner sobbing hysterically about the state of the world fisting peanut m&ms into my mouth as the baby takes his first steps across the living room floor, and you can bet they'll be away from me.

Dear god, he will be thinking, why is bipedalism so difficult? I'd be miles away by now if I could just figure out this balancing bullshit.

So here we are. It's not even seven, the baby has curled up in my lap for a post-pancake nap, and I am too wired to take him back to sleep and actually get some shut eye.
I think about his instincts though, and I must commend him.
I mean, getting up early because you're hungry, eating a pile of pancakes, and then taking a snooze sounds like every dumb instagrammer's "perfect Sunday" so he must be doing something right.

I on the other hand am now vibrating at a frequency that makes my dog's knees buckle.
There is no hope here in the Gonzo Motherland.
Give me twelve hours,
we'll be in bat country.