Bite me.

Well, that was a whole lot of bullshit. After breezing through the arrivals of teeth numbers 1, 2 and 3, the last week or so was an extremely unwelcome experience in the fresh hell of TEETHING. It started with a fever and ended five days later with a baby so exhausted he fell asleep in my arms as I was feeding him, and didn't stir when I put him in his sleeping bag and his cot. I don't think I've seen him that asleep since he was about six weeks old.

We've had incessant grizzling; hourly wakeups in the night; catnapping during the day; a jump in breastfeeding that made my boobs go up a cup size; clingyness to the point of me needing to leave the house on the weekend so that I could have an hour not attached to a dribbling, whinging child; and enough drool to soak t-shirts in minutes and suddenly accelerate the kid's ability to drink water from a cup as opposed to just spitting on the rim - a skill that he had thus far been utterly disinterested in. I know I am prone to hyperbole, but I am not joking here. All of this and more.

Even baby nurofen, which we fell upon in desperation on Friday afternoon, only made him deliriously, somersaultingly happy for an hour or so before the cackling turned back to crying. He lost his voice from screaming, and there is nothing quite so heartbreakingly hilarious as the sound of the tiny squeak he so furiously forced out at 5 am on Sunday morning. When cuddling, settling, feeding and snuggling for an hour didn't stop the screeching, we all three got the hell out of the house and pounded the cigarette-butt-littered streets of St Kilda in the crisp dawn air. Nothing like black-eyed, bleary parents walking zombie-like, past punters on their way home looking much the same.

Somewhere in the mess of the weekend, we also went to Bunnings, in an effort to make the concrete paradise of our back yard a little more appealing. Eat my fake grass, Jamie Durie.

Look at him. Happy as a lark. Don't be fooled. That's the nurofen talking.