Sleep deprivation and bowl haircuts

One. That’s the average number of hours sleep I’ve been getting this past eight days.
Five. That’s the total number of teeth the baby is pushing through raw roaring red gums.
Three. That’s the number of times I thought I was literally going to go insane with sheer exhaustion.
Two. The number of brain cells I have left to speak of after a week of severe sleep deprivation.
There has been a lot of restlessness, irritability and greatly disturbed sleep patterns, sore gums, flushed cheeks and intense dribbling but I’m sure my symptoms will start to improve when I get more sleep.
The kid’s teeth are much like buses. There are none for ages and then they all come at once. Every night he wakes at 11pm, fuses and screams until 6am.
The night revolves around me trying to figure out what he wants. If I had one of those machines that deciphers babies cries a typical 30 seconds with Finn would tell me this…
“I want to sleep, no I DON'T want to sleep. Can you not hear me woman? I WANT TO SLEEP. What are you doing I told you I’m not tired!! Sleep is for the weak. God I’m so excruciatingly tired I cannot function. Give me that dummy. Take that blasted dummy away. Here, give me it again. Take it away it’s burning my gums. Give it back, take it away!!”
And so on, for seven hours.
Over the past few nights I have tried everything to get him, and therefore me, some decent sleep. I have wheeled him up and down the hall in his pram, paced up and down the bedroom rocking him in my arms and drove him around the streets of Derry in the wee small hours just to get some shuteye. It worked alright until I slowed down or stopped when, much like in the Hollywood blockbuster Speed, he would explode. Not literally, you understand, just in a fit of screaming. Although there were times the screaming was so intense I thought human combustion might have been his next trick, leaving only his little smouldering dinosaur socks.
In my sleep deprived state I didn’t really have the energy to get totally embarrassed by having a picture of my 6-year-old self broadcast on RTE last week. Because my brother is playing a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, the RTE crew came to our house and filmed us all. My mother clearly felt I hadn’t suffered half enough and gave the TV crew pictures of my brother and I when we were small to put a bit of history into the piece. So there I was fabulous bowl haircut, Christmas tree jumper and horrendous brown flairs on national television for, in my opinion, a longer than necessary 10 seconds.
When normal sleeping services resume, if I don’t expire due to exhaustion in the interim, I can look forward to dying of embarrassment.