A major design flaw

One of my worst memories from the kids' early infancy is also one which highlights a major design flaw of children - they don't come with instructional manuals. I'm married to an engineer and even he has moments where he wishes he could just RTFM (read the fucking manual.)

The witching hour had come (for all babies, somewhere between 3-6 pm) and I was at home alone with the trio. One kid was crying and the other two were content. I took crying baby (god knows, now, WHO that kid was) and picked them up to give them a cuddle and a bounce. Said kid was happy for a few seconds, and then would let out an ear-piercing scream. Resume cuddle and bounce, and hope for the best. Few minutes later, second child starts to cry. They were pretty small (and I'm pretty big) so I picked up crying baby #2 and rocked them both. Forget my hearing, I was managing okay, although my back started to ache. Of course baby 3 had some extra sensory perception and could TELL that I was both tired and in pain, and thus started up his/her own crying. Just to, you know, ADD to the whole experience. Obviously I couldn't jiggle them all in my arms, so I thought I'd just...sit down. HA! BAD IDEA. All children are born with an altitude meter, and so they know when you are sitting down, and they DO NOT LIKE IT one little bit. You may not sit down with a baby, because by doing so you are risking getting tinitus from the screaming in your ear.

I put one kid in the bouncer seat thingie, and held onto two. With my foot I attempted to jiggle the bouncer, but as everyone knows those stupid things don't bounce all that well (considering it's called a BOUNCER, you expect the bloody thing to BOUNCE, don't you?) This plan was a good one, but it didn't work. The noise had approached deafening levels, my back had approached pain level 18 (on a 1-10 scale) and no amount of singing, jiggling, massaging, asking nicely, begging, pleading or crying was working to get these kids to SHUT UP.

In that moment I understood why women do things like drive their kids into rivers and basically go completely bonkers in the space of 10 seconds.

In that moment I also realised that there was really only one more thing to do - cry (literally) for help. I called DH (who at that time worked 2km's from home) and begged him to come and help me. He agreed, and I hung up the phone, sat on the floor and cried. I cried and I BEGGED, literally BEGGED these babies to stop crying. I could not, for the life of me, work out what the heck was WRONG with these kids. They had no obvious signs of tired, hungry or dirty. They were just crying, and for no reason.

Me, I was crying for a very good reason. Some MORON made me in charge of these three human beings, but completely FAILED to tell me how to look after them.

Thereafter I found myself wondering why placentas did not come equipped with a (waterproof, of course) book on WHAT THE FUCK TO DO WITH YOUR KID instructions. How amazing would it be to have a sort of Almanac of your child's life, where on any given day you could look up that date and it would TELL you what the problem was and how to solve it. Surely...surely that would be a heck of a lot more useful than a sack o' bodily stuff which you plant in your backyard.

I'm just sayin'.