What Do You Do When...

I hasten to add, this is not actually my child

Mothering Question Number 56: What do you do on days when you have plans (miraculously) and the weather is fine and you finally have an opportunity to get out of the emming-effing house, but these plans, benign as they are -- lunch and travel time, 2+ hours max -- get in the way of your child's nap and then he becomes an insane, maniacal beast in the manner of Grendel's mother for hours after the fact?

What do you do when feeding him, walking around and holding him close while murmuring reassurances, "winding him down," as it were, don't work, and instead, he is doing that cry in which his mouth forms a rictus of frustration and rage, his tongue quivers like a manic eel, he's screaming right in your ear and he looks like he wants you to suffer as he does?  For hours?

There are pauses, of course.  And this is what brings on the madness.  During his second bottle in forty-five minutes, he will smile at you, causing him to stop drinking entirely for a minute and charming you into a false sense of security.  Sometimes he will actually appear to begin a successful nap, and this charade will last for fourteen minutes, long enough for you to invest in the middle of Kenneth Branagh's awful 1993 adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, which actually has Keanu Reeves in it, and you feel like, OK, things are going to be OK.

But. No. No. They. Are. Most. Decidedly. Not.