How do I use signals, interrupts and alarms in this program?

I am working on a school lab but I am stuck with understanding exactly how to handle signals.

In the lab I'm supposed to set an alarm based on the duration from the argument list. During the duration of the alarm, anytime I hit (Ctrl + C) a message should pop up saying "Interrupts disabled". I need to handle the alarm signal so when it goes off I will execute a command also from the argument list. The command should be a single word command such as "ls" which lists all directories or "pwd" which lists the present working directory. Also after the alarm goes off I need to reset the interrupts to the default which enables (Ctrl + C) to quit the process whenever pressed.

At the bottom is the code I have so far. My problem is trying to set the interrupt to default after the alarm goes off. I thought maybe in the alarm_hanlder I could reset it to default but that doesn't seem to work.
If I take the line ---> signal(SIGINT, interrupt);   out of the while loop I can only use the interrupt once. The second time I press (Ctrl+c) it will actually quit the process.

The next thing that puzzles me is even though the alarm_handler handles the alarm how can I have the alarm_handler execute the command inputed by the user?
The user input is : a.out 4 ls    <-   argv[1] is "4" which is the duration of alarm and argv[2] is "ls" which is the command to be executed.
I know I need to use execlp(argv[1], argv[2],  "NULL");   but I am not sure exactly how to use it in the alarm_handler because I need to pass the values argv[1] and argv[2] to the handler some how? or is the only way to do this by declaring global variables and make these values equal to argv[1] and argv[2]?
In order to not loss my current process I need to create a child process to run execlp();
Perhaps I am doing this completely wrong and I should have the execlp() in main(); although I would be very confused on how that would work?

Thanks in advance.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <signal.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

void alarm_handler(int);
void interrupt(int);
     
void alarm_handler(int dummy){
      printf("I received an alarm %d\n", dummy);
     signal(SIGINT,SIG_DFL);
      /* if ( fork() == 0 )
              execlp(argv[1], argv[2], "NULL");
      */
}
         
void interrupt(int signal){
    printf("Interrupt disabled until delayed command is executed\n");
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[]){

     int x = atoi( argv[1] );

     signal(SIGALRM, alarm_handler);//install handler
     alarm(x);

     while(1){
         signal(SIGINT, interrupt);
         sleep(1);
     }

}