Get On Board the Sleep Train

So! The first frenetic newborn months have finally passed and life has finally resumed something of a routine, the baby is still a baby but she's now four months old, and is smiling, babbling, cooing, rolling over on occasion - most of which first happened while I was out of town on business, natch - and it has finally come time for sleep training.

For those who aren't yet or aren't about to become parents - number one, you've got better things to read, likely on Pinterest, but two, sleep training is, well, like any kind of training, you're learning how to do something. Now, it may seem weird, the idea that one must learn to sleep, but there it is, the idea that collapsing in a supine position to become totally vulnerable to the world whilst you saw logs takes learning and practice the way a ninja must learn ninjitsu - kinda. You gotta assassinate those bags under your eyes?

Anyway, for the past four months, or third of a year, so we make sure we have a little perspective, we've been helping our little girl go to sleep, shushing, bouncing, swaddling, swaying, hugging, patting, rocking, etc. etc., so now her sleep-muscles are as undeveloped as her neck muscles were before we started militarizing tummy-time ("you drop and give me 2 more minutes on your tummy, soldier! Stare at yourself in the mirror and smile, goddam it!"). But we've finally come to the conclusion that she needs to learn how to sleep on her own, in her own room.

Crunchy granola types (my people) may suggest that having a child learn to sleep, through the tears earned through training, is cruel and that these beautiful, delicate beings should sleep for as many years as they want, nestled in the warm bosom of their attached parents, secure in the belief that there is always a space for them in their mother and father's hearts and bed. But I say nuts to that - nuts to that idea because I'm someone who never learnt to sleep. For as long as I can remember, I've had difficulty sleeping, and perhaps some of that problem is dispositional, but maybe, maybe if my parents had trained me in the morphic arts I would be a better sleeper now, instead of someone who spent eight of his adult years sleeping on a couch because the bed meant insomnia.

So we've concluded that our baby needs to learn how to fall asleep on her own. But how? There are a gajillion baby books, subdivided into a bazillion baby sleep books. Our, or at least my, conclusion was that in many ways it didn't matter which method or technique or style ("watch my uncanny five-toed sloth-style sleep technique!" spoken in mismatched dubbing), but most important would be that we did something as loving parents, and were consistent.

We'd already decided that simply leaving the baby in her room to cry by herself wasn't us, the equivalent of water-boarding a precious child to sleep. But it seemed that there would by needs be some amount of crying involved. Every time during the day we'd see her gummy smile light up over the past couple of weeks that we'd been discussing our approach, clouded by our fevered imaginations of our precious child weeping, unconsoled, behind the imprisoning bars of her crib, we'd immediately begin having second thoughts, concluding that perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if we all co-slept in a family bed until she was 21 or maybe 50, we'd just need to get something bigger than our full. (Okay, joke - we have a queen. But something much, much bigger.) So after reading much Anne Lamott for courage (and yes, I'm the father in this relationship, just like the blog's title says, and yes, I read and love Anne Lamott) and a few baby sleep books for ideas, tonight we've finally embarked on our sleep train.

After I made an actually very excellent butternut squash soup for dinner (please see the note about Anne Lamott above), we started the baby's bedtime routine with a bath, change of clothes, cuddle, story, prayer of thanks, and then World War III.

I put her in the crib, stroked and kissed her (actually, given the scratchiness of my 'stache, perhaps that wasn't the most soothing thing to do), and then walked out of her life forever, or at least that's what it sounded like I was doing to her little tiny four and a half month old soul. My poor wife was bunkered down in our room with headphones on trying to drown out the cries of our infant with Soul Asylum - perhaps Elliott Smith would have been more appropriate, I'll have to suggest that to her for tomorrow night. The baby cried, she wept, she wailed, she gnashed her gums and would have rent her garments if the velcro hadn't made that particular move less dramatic, hey, perhaps that's what professional mourners should do, use pre-rent, velcroed garments for effect, like grief-stricken strippers, oh Marvin, why'dja leave me, riiiiip!!

I sat in the next room, sipping beer and watching the timer count down while reading and re-reading the chapter on what the hell I was supposed to do next, because in the moment, in the panic, nothing seemed to make sense.

Now, I've done enough stuff that's required endurance that I've been able to observe it a bit. Time doesn't want to go on, it just kinda parks there, whether you're running a marathon or watching your wife in labor or you're a child again and it's the middle of the night and your adulterous father isn't coming home even though you're sitting on the curb and waiting for the lights of his car to come up the street, and that time'll keep going, and then the point will come where you don't think you can take it any more and then that point kinda sails by, and then you write about it, minutes, hours, days, years later, because it's over, only it's not, the thing is over but your life and what happened is never over because it's a part of who you are.

But I knew my baby-cakes was a tough girl, and even though it took her 57 minutes tonight, I knew in my heart of hearts that she was strong enough to do it, strong enough to fall asleep, and she did.

'RENTSTERS

My wife turns to me while we walk, side by each, fall leaves crunching under our sandals, and comments, "we were totally in to 21 Jump Street before any one else!"  She pauses, snorts a half laugh with the realization, saying, "'we were in to it before any one else' - what are we, hipsters?"

I stop in my tracks.  "Honey - we just went to a farmer's market.  And then to a bar.  With our baby.  I have facial hair.  We're carrying a case of PBR home right now.  I think the least of our worries is whether we liked an 80's t.v. show before anyone else."

She looks at askance;  "I meant 21 Jump Street, the movie."

"Oh."  That's all I can manage.  We start walking again.  The case of Pabst is getting heavy.

BEAUTIFUL SLUMBER

People have in mind this idea that "sleeping like a baby" is the highest level of somno-mastery;  it's this almost hindu-buddhist notion that the best sleep requires you to return to the beginning of your developmental abilities, you return to your origin to become the best at something.

However, people are clearly talking out of their necks when they say that sleeping like a baby is so peaceful because they neglect to mention that sleeping infants sound weird, not only do they sound weird, they sound somehow menacing and terrifying.

Never mind that for almost the first trimester of life outside of the womb you'll panic every night at the weird sounds your sleeping baby makes, and then panic when she stops making them, worried sick that she isn't, or perhaps is, breathing, enough so that fathers have gone to technologically absurd lengths to find peace of mind about their breathing, or unbreathing, child (like a new parent's version of quantum entanglement with a new but somehow ancient Schrodinger's cat of neonatal apnea) - the baby's gasking for air (something a teen-aged mother once told me when I was a med student in Michigan - "my baby's gasking for air")... now it's too quiet, I don't know if she's breathing.

But everyone's forgotten to mention to you (except maybe scared teen mom from Michigan, sorry, sister, I shoulda listened to your wisdom then), sleepless, frightened new parent, is that babies sound totally ca-razy when they sleep - they sigh, they snort, they'll fart, they'll whimper, weep, then whimper-weep, then they'll make a particular ululation that I can only describe as the cry of a miniature tauntaun in heat, actually, she sounds like Daryl Hannah in Splash, she sounds like a weird mermaid, which is as alarming as it sounds, and then settle down again to leave you wondering, in the pitchy blackness of your once adults-only bedroom, is she breathing?

Apparently, sleeping like a baby means that you sleep and don't give a rat's ass about how totally weird and scary you sound to the people who are still awake around you.

I SHALL CALL HER "MINI"

Small versions of anything are just cute.  Just think - full-grown adult lion:  scary.  Baby lion?  Adorable!

Big corn?  Stuck in your teeth.  Baby corn?  Add Tom Hanks and it's comedy gold.

Giant buddha statue made of stone?  Kinda weird.  Little tiny buddha statue on your dashboard?  Kinda cute.

Baby baby-fart?  Cute!  Big baby-fart followed by full diaper - not so cute.

MILESTONES!

Today, my baby threw up in my mouth for the first time.

The bucket-list keeps getting shorter...

A PENNY SAVED

The thrill of parenting is in such quotidian pleasures as finding a deal.

F'rinstance, a deal for diapers.  Typically, it makes sense to buy a larger pack as you get a better deal, right?  So, while awaiting our child to finally grow out of newborn diapers, we've been buying them in an ad hoc fashion from Target.  We usually get the Pampers Swaddlers newborn (with wetness indicator!) in a 96 pack.

Today, however, I discovered that there's a sale on the 36 count packs for $9.49, which works out to a unit price of about 26 cents - but wait, there's more!  If you buy three of the 36 packs you receive a $5 Target gift card, and of course, even though that essentially ensures more money coming into their coffers, that effectively decreases the unit price to about 21 cents, and boom, you're doublin' your money all day long, or at least getting a fairly good deal.

And even those few cents can add up and make a difference - after all, even a humble penny can be worth far more than its currency value.

Now if only I could figure out a way for this trick to pay for a trip to Hawaii...

EVERYTHING KEEPS CHANGING, OVER AND OVER AGAIN

Another afternoon spent getting the baby to relax, which got me thinking:

When I first started dating - actually, throughout my relationships with women - there'd be many occasions when something wouldn't quite be comfortable.  Now, don't read something naughty in here that isn't there;  what I mean is that with past girlfriends, your hands would be entwined in a particular way that the circulation to your fingertips would slowly be strangulated off, or you're sitting next to each other in an awkward way that's straining one of your knee's ligaments, or perhaps you're cuddling in the way they always do in the movies, only in films they don't mention the fact that your arm is slowly falling asleep and her elbow is digging uncomfortably into your spare tire flab, but you don't care, this is awesome, it's you and your girlfriend!

I'm reminded of the above because right now, I'm on the bouncy ball with the baby strapped to my chest with the Ergo, browsing the interwebs.  Her beautiful sleeping face is just below my chin so I just have to tilt my head a little to kiss her brow or sniff her hair.  And her left zygomatic arch and mandible are digging into my sternum in the most uncomfortable fashion, no matter how much and how gently I've tried to adjust her face's position, and like with those old girlfriends I can't seem to get comfortable. It's a bit tortuous.

But sitting here, listening to her quiet little baby's farts while she slumbers with the boniest part of her head and face pressed into the most sensitive bits of my torso, I wouldn't move her and wake her for the world, I love being here right now with my baby, our baby, our beautiful child, pressed against my heart.

Plus, if she woke up, I wouldn't be able to blog anymore.

EXTRACURRICULARS ARE INTIMIDATING

Okay, so the baby's now five weeks old so I realize that talking about her extracurricular activities may not only be a bit premature, it may be a little high-expectations Asian father.

Actually, my wife's blood type is A+, a fact she lords over me incessantly.

But it's never too early, right?  The question is, what activities?  She's got long, beautiful, clever fingers that photograph well (that part, she takes after me, the photogenic digits), so in terms of musical instruments, of course she'll be playing piano, first violin, or theremin.  But what sport?  What sport will allow her to distinguish herself when she applies to college, Ivy League, Berkeley, not Berklee?  Because, after all, you've gotta play some sport, right, and she's gotta stand out.  So, that means that the usual suspects are out.  Soccer?  Way too many Mia Hamm wannabes, there's no way to really stand out.  Softball?  Too butch.  Swimming?  Do you have any idea what kind of infections you can get from spending that much time in the water?  Running, like cross country?  Veeeery appealing to her father, but again, way too many participants, tough to really get on top.  And then I figured it out:  sport shooting.

Yeah, competitive sport shooting!  Like IDPA, IPSC, USPSA, pistols!  I got my idea when I found out about this 17 year old who's sponsored by Glock:



Perfect!  It's different enough, there aren't but a few competitors relatively speaking so she'd have a better chance of really standing out, and the bonus is that I could sleep soundly at night knowing that she could pretty well take care of herself.

Forget that Katniss nonsense, gimme Annie Oakley over here!

EVERYONE FEARS A BABY

So tonight we made a visit to the Orange Street Fair, and annual event in the city of Orange that involves my favorite things, cart food and beer - nothing's as delightful as standing on a sidewalk eating a messy, freshly cooked souvlaki and downing it with beer.

As it is every year, it was turribly warm with a fearsome sun, but this year was different - this year, we had babies.

Being a polite sort of person my habit is to give way to others and stand politely aside while those older/female/portlier/notnecessarilyalloftheseatthesametime go ahead, it's what gentlemens do, which makes navigating the throngs of sweaty, buzzed Orange Countians difficult to do, in fact it'd bring you to a grinding halt as the next bro lopes by with a Bud light spilling out onto his pants or the inked hep-cat 50's wannabe guides his Bettie Page-be-banged (talking about hair styles here, people) pin-up wannabe to his awaiting fellow soul-patched small-brim hat wearing buddies, or cats, or whatever the hell they call each other.  At this point, when it looked like I'd never get to the beer cart, my wife instructed me to forget those people, they'll get outta the way.  The crazy thing is, they actually did!

The seas of people parted in front of our stroller like a Russian ice breaker racing towards the North pole, plastic surgery disasters practically leapt out of the way for fear that they may actually contact our pram.  Which, I think, speaks well of these folks, that they want to treat our littlest Orange County citizens with some gentleness, or perhaps it's that they were afraid that it was catching, i.e. littleness, or perhaps pregnancy and the resulting little one would happen if they just accidentally touched the stroller, but it was pretty amazing.

The funny thing was that the same phenomenon didn't hold true for the older children, so what's the cut off?  Is it when they're one?  Three?  Surely not eight?  At what age, at what point do we stop getting out of the way for others?

Thing is they actually shouldn't want to accidentally touch me - I work in health care, I'm probably swimming in MRSA.

LVEL UP!!1!

I'm typing with only one hand as I've finally gotten my child to fall asleep in thr - drats - the side-stomach position, cradled in the other hand, so my kyboard output is by needs sloe and error-ridden.  But what an amazing feeling, realizing that I have the ability to calm my baby from a crying fit, even though I don't have breasts!

Okay, that probably takes a little 'splainin'.  Numbder one:  a pleasing part of video gaming is the ability to improve and progress through the game, i.e. leveling up.  When you reach a new milestone in the game your character makes a quantized leap a level with the resulting flood of smug, self-satisfied endorphins.

That doesn't explain the breastlessness comment though, so stick with me here.  Okay, as a dude I often wonder if the baby's crying because she's hungry (after all, that's what I do when my belly's empty), and to my longsuffering wife's distress I'm constantly asking if it's time to feed the child yet, especially if she's crying, because so often, magically, she'll quiet right down with milk.  So it's especially satisfying to be able to get the baby to stop crying on my own, without resorting to the assumption that she must be hungry (even though, come to think of it, maybe that's why I'm feeling cranky right now).

So just now, while I was glorying in the discovery that Call of Duty:  Black Ops is in high-definition 3D, when the baby started wailing, I began to sweat a little, she didn't want the Ergo carrier, she didn't want the swaddle, but come on, yo, I got this!  And by doing a combo move of a swaddle, exercise ball bounce, shushing, and pacifier I found myself now on the exercise ball, left arm going numb while I type with my right hand, slight sheen of sweat everywhere, but that's right, bitches, who's your daddy now, or at least the father of the little floppy angel in my right hand, and come to think of it, it's the same person who was her daddy nine months ago, i.e. me.

Leveled up, though!  Still no breasts....

PARENTING TAKES BALLS - BALLS THAT MEASURE 65, MAYBE 75 CENTIMETERS IN DIAMETER

As a doctor, I love to hear babies cry.

There, I've said it, confirming what you probably knew about your own sadistic pediatrician.  Actually, that always drives me nuts, when people threaten their children with their doctors.  For example, my father used to routinely threaten my baby half-sister (she's 28 years younger than I) that I, her saintly elder, would give her a shot if she didn't behave.  Silly paterfamilias, everyone knows that the nurses are the ones who administer the shots, and the only person who takes a sick pleasure in inflicting pain is your dentist.

Anyway, getting back to the topic sentence at hand:  I love to hear babies cry, professionally speaking, because a crying baby is one that is not at death's door.  After all, if a baby can cry, the lungs are working, the airway's open, the brain is getting enough blood to trigger the muscles that make a cry and is healthy enough to perceive that something requires protest, etc. etc.  Think of it this way:  can you imagine how sick a kid would have to be to not be able to cry?

Of course, as a new parent, crying drives me nuts like it does anyone else.  Now, back in the day where we all lived in the same village, if the baby started crying and we were too tired to deal with it, we'd hand her over, say, another woman, usually a kinswoman, who would also be nursing a child, and that family member/close friend/villager would do a little wet-nursing duty, or if we were so sleep-deprived that we were about to start a blog about parenting, we'd hand our otherwise angelic spawn over to another family member who'd muffle the cries long enough for us to get another hour of sleep or so.

But in our brave, new nomadic and de-extended-familied world (and frankly, would you really want to live in a village like that, Big Love-style?) (if you do, message me, as I have a script I'd like to write about you), we're stuck with "there ain't no nothin' we can't love each other through," and we have to come up with all of the clever ways to soothe our newborns ourselves.  Thus, enter the balls.

I mean, of course, the big rubber kind, pilates balls, exercise balls, birthing balls, whatever you want to call them.  (As a child in the 70s, we had a big, inflated rubber bouncy ball that had a horse-shape and a handle.  I stabbed mine with a letter opener one day, just to see what would happen.  This story has nothing to do with the fact that National Knife Day was yesterday.)  These things are miracle workers!  So I'm sure you've seen friends use them as office desk chairs to improve posture, or around people's homes as exercise tools or even just spare seats.  Generics are available at Target for 15 bucks, and they're worth it.  There has been many a night where the baby's crying, her diaper's empty, stomach full, and yet still crying despite swaddling, side-positioning, even shushing, etc., which have been the nights that I've schlepped our angel down to our bouncy ball.

Actually, I imagine it's the same idea as a rocking chair, just a steady rhythmic motion that mimics being back in the womb (for the child, just to be clear), only the bouncy balls are a bit more useful since you can move them readily, they can be deployed as spare furniture, and if you run over the cat's tail you really don't do any damage.

The large size, 75cm, is a bit biggish, and the small ones, 55cm, are a little too small.  I think most people of most sizes will find the 65cm balls the most comfortable to bounce on without fears that they'll sleepily bounce off and onto their child.

And now, since as a parent the word "balls" is de-sexualized, I'm going to revert to adolescence and see how many more times I can say it without getting in trouble:  balls balls balls balls balls...

SO - IT HAS COME TO THIS

The baby's only three weeks old, which means she sleeps most of the time so going out is a distinct possibility, but it's a Saturday night and I've spent the past three hours or so posting political links of facebook and reading the hell out of reddit.

Actually, confession:  this is probably what we woulda been doing on a Saturday night four weeks ago too...

Holy crow, yet another reason why "mommy blogs" may make more sense than a daddy blog:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/08/23/159925707/hospitals-bank-liquid-gold-human-breast-milk?ps=sh_sthdl%3Futm_source%3Dnpr&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20120824

LADIES FROM GENTLEMEN

In college I learned that the title "gentlemen" (in England, from whence the term came) only applied to a) landowners, and/or 3) college graduates.  Being an undergraduate at the time, I was neither a landowner nor was I, by definition, a college graduate, and every single final exam period I would sweat over whether or not I'd ever become a true gentlemen.

Of course, when we now speak of what a gentleman is we typically think of all the social niceties that men purportedly no longer adhere to (like dangling participles which, as it turns out, aren't incorrect at all), things like holding doors open, allowing other people priority ("you snooze, you lose" is one of the most grating expressions of self-justification I hear on the street) (to which I take it daily, i.e. to the streets), telling others it's a pleasure to meet them whether it is or isn't, etc.  But these manners, and other qualities that make one a gentleman, were ones with which I am pretty familiar, which is to say that I'm pretty sure that I could teach a boy to be a gentleman, especially because any child of mine is getting its ass into college, getting a job, and moving the hell out once they're of adult age, i.e. 18.

The growing anxiety I now have is that I'm not sure how I'm supposed to teach my daughter how to be a lady.  Now, fo' sho, if we'da had a boy my wife would have had plenty of input into how he was to be a gentleman, and I'm certain it'll work vice versa, i.e. my wife will have tons to teach our daughter in terms of how to be a lady and I, as her father, will have lots to say from the dudespective.  But I'm also a bit worried that I'd end up teaching her a bunch of nonsense about being a lady that I, as a guy, will have stitched together from various Disney movies, My Fair Lady, Bronte sister novels, etc., that would in effect be this caricature of what it is to be a lady, i.e. the manners-version of a really bad tranny.

Now, of course, a lot of this anxiety is entirely misplaced, because, after all, plenty of same-sex parents raise perfectly well-mannered ladies and gentlemen;  I guess I'm more apprehensive about what I'm going to do to my child - which, I guess, means that none of y'all have anything to worry about since I'm not raising your spawn, but still, it certainly does make me think.

Funny thing is, there's so much else that's arguably a lot more important to take care of, participles that dangle aside.  F'rinstance, from the pediatrician's office and through the post we've now received several samples of infant formula.  Now, since we're breastfeeding (ha ha, "we're", meaning my poor wife, but it's kinda my habit to take credit for stuff, which I've gotta stop doing), formula isn't something we need so we'd planned on donating it to a local foodbank as this stuff's pretty damn expensive.

Which has gotten me thinking, there are parents (and children without parents) who need this super-pricey infant formula, upon which these little lives depend, and I can imagine the impoverished single mother only sparingly feeding her little one, trying to make a can of this expensive formula last as long as she can, and in the meanwhile, all I can think of is how I'm going to teach my daughter how to be a lady, as if knowing how to not smack her lips and slurp her tea is somehow making her a better human, when the truth of the matter is that remembering and caring for others is what's really important.

Hey, maybe I have this parenting thing dialed down after all...

MILEDROPS

So our daughter formed her first tears today while crying:  two little, pretty drops on her eyelids while crankily asking to be fed.  Will wonders never cease?

THE END IS ALWAYS A LIE

Children of Men was one of the most egregiously overlooked films of 2006;  it happens to be one of the best near-future dystopian movies of recent memory too.  But the reason I bring it up is because I'm going to talk about it a very little bit, and seeing as how very few people... um, saw it, you should know that there's a spoiler here, but I'll presume that by now you've actually seen it or don't care to.

The quick and dirty:  the not so-distant future where for some reason it turns out that humankind is no longer able to reproduce and as a result civil society is crumbling to pieces.  At first blush it may seem a puzzling premise but the more you think about it the more it makes sense:  humanity is going out not with a bang but rather with a long, drawn out whimper, a war lost by attrition, one geriatric person at a time.  So one of the movie's emotional apices, near its end, is a scene in which the first baby is born in something like 19 years;  Clive Owen's character, who'd presumably given himself up to alcohol, midwifes this infant into the world - it's quite a stunning part of the film, a real emotional high point.

Well, the movie ends a bit thereafter, with the new baby and mother found by a Greenpeace-like group organized to research human fertility that had threatened all along to be nothing more than a MacGuffin but turns out, ta-dah, to be the real deal, and like most works of fiction the story ends there at this high point.

What I always ponder about these tales is what happens afterwards, the climax hits and then what happens?  What Children of Men doesn't go into is the countless sleepless nights listening to see if the baby is going apneic or just snorting, if she's throwing up Jimi Hendrix-styles or just spitting up like the baby she is, nothing about the boat full of old people who strain to remember what newborns are like after 19 some-odd years of the absence of infants from the world, all of the pressure to treat and not to treat this child differently, how not to spoil them, how to change their diapers and what to do if there's a rash, how to feed them, teach them, that is, all of the stuff that parenting is all about but isn't in the movie which, after all, is Children of Men, not Parents of Men, which, come to think of it, is the movie that I really wish I could see now 'cause I could use some advice, it being late and with me trying not to fret if the baby runs out of nappies again.

And for now, some nicknames that we have for the baby:  Baby, Chicken, Chucken, Baby-Cakes, Penny-Jao (after one of the children in the documentary Babies, Ponijao).

RUBBING THE NEW RIGHT OFF

There are many times that my wife and I will stare at our newborn daughter in amazement.  Babies look cute and beautiful to their own parents (thereby diminishing the depth of the sigh one heaves out of one's chest when she begins to cry at 1:30 in the morning), we can't help but sit in astonishment that this child is really ours.

Not because she has the milkman's hair.

A fun fact that'll take some of the shine off:  newborns urinate every 10 to 20 minutes.

We made this.  (Image from imgur.)

And yes, I do realize how many pee-pee/poo-poo posts I've had so far, but that's no reason to snicker like a schoolchild.

TOO MUCH IS... SOMETIMES TOO MUCH

Hoo boy, one of the most nerve-wracking parts of parenting has to be the worry that you're going to break your newborn.  Now, for those who've more than one child, I imagine your anxiety level decreases with each successive child, because a) you've got experience and 3) you've already got a kid or two so this one's kinda back up.  But I only say that since I was the oldest child.

But there's so much more to this fear than simply worrying that you're going to accidentally drop your child into the toilet or otherwise mistakenly begin World War 3 (perhaps late at night, after a feeding, trying to get your infant to sleep, and you begin browsing the interwebses and accidentally tell the computer, why yes, yes I would like to play a game, instead of blogging like you shoulda been doing), there are little things, and by little things, I mean your baby's bits and pieces.

So it turns out (and remember, y'all, I'm a board-certified medical doctor, and it may tell you something that I'm all worked up about this matter.  And that something should be that nothing you do is going to protect your child from harm, no matter how much you know or what kind of ninja training you have, it doesn't matter if you're Albert Schweitzer, something's going to happen - these are the crazed thoughts I have in the middle of the night.  When I should be blogging) that breastfed newborns have naturally runny poop, and a lot of them, and it's not diarrhea, even though if it were you you'd be running for the Kaopectate and cursing whoever decided to order a slice of cheesecake after the cheese plate and the malted shake and quattro formaggi pizza all washed down with Kahlua.

Anyway, today, after changing one of our beautiful baby girl's many, many shitty diapers, I noticed a red, beefy looking area of irritation to her poor anus, the same one that has sharted upon her loving father multiple times over the past couple of weeks, each time to his stunned surprise, and my heart just about cracked in two.  What the duck!?  Why does it look like that!?  My wife and I fretted over the redness for a while, flagellating ourselves while trying, somehow, to encourage the other, no no, beloved, I must've been wiping her with sandpaper hands whereas you've been changing her with the gentleness of angels' farts, the quiet little kinds that the Precious Moments angels must have, not the thunderous kind that I have after eating quattro formaggi 'za.

Well, I'm pretty sure it's not candida (i.e. a yeast infection), I know hella sure what that looks like having seen it all the time at work.  At this point I think that it's this sadly simple:  we've been cleaning her too vigorously and conscientiously with her diaper changes.  Our love for our baby girl has compelled us to overdo it.  We've been changing diapers like the Abominable Snowman loves Daffy Duck in those Warner Bros. cartoons, I'm going to pat it and wipe it and call it George, and too much of a good thing, even cleanliness, can be irritating.  Anally.

So, my wife and I have pledged to take it easy for a while, apply an ointment for comfort for a while, and see how things go until our next pediatrician's visit this coming Tuesday - we'll keep you updated.

SO... IT HAS COME TO THIS

The baby's had her evening feeding and is now swaddled and in her bassinet... my wife is asleep with her ear plugs in... I've applied Salon Pas to my neck, where I'd been nursing a strain for the past two weeks or so... Nobody ever told me that growing up would smell so mentholy...

TASTEMAKERS (cont'd)

A quick post:

Tonight's tune - still hoping for anti-douche...

TASTEMAKERS

So I'm taking a necessary paternity leave from work which has given me time to change the baby's diapers, take photos, learn how to set up and use the perambulator, set up and use the new fangled filmless camera that apparently takes movies, and have plenty of skin-to-skin time as well.  I may have mentioned in the past that I believe there is a definite Maternal-Industrial Complex in this nation (all one has to do is look no further than Babies 'R Us or watch The Jersey Shore to come to this belief), and although I want to cash in on this gig, from a previously posted photo you may be able to tell that simple trick, i.e. the button-up semi-dress shirt, is a perfectly adequate substitute for any slinging/baby-carrying product one might pay Benjamins by the nearest La Leche League encampment.  Provided you don't move anywhere and risk having the baby slip out of your shirt and onto the pavement.

Well, one more thing that I have to worry about is whether my child is going to grow up to be cool or a douche.  Now, by douche, I don't mean exclusively the Ed Hardy wearing/Not of this World car-sticker having (in case you're not in or haven't been near Southern California/Orange County in a while, the NOTW reference is to the proliferation of stickers that cryptically signal that the car's owner is a member of the endangered Christian minority, kinda like the original ICHTHYS fish in the Roman catacombs, only nothing like that at all since Christians are the bullying majority around these parts, and I can say that as one of those - they, meaning we, act like we're smuggling bibles into Soviet Russia by plastering the rear windows of our cars with these decals that look like Ed Hardy rip-offs [which brings me to the separate point that Christians somehow don't seem to think that it's an infringement on intellectual property rights if it's a Christian related thing, like appropriating a Coca Cola jingle or Calvin and Hobbes, after all, it's Christian so it's the exception] that spell out in various kinds of Gothic or Evanescence-type font, "NOTW", "Not of this World", meaning Christians aren't of this world, they're actually some kind of space alien here to probe your atheist rectum with spiritual rectitude) type - and don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that I don't want our daughter to be Christian - but I don't want her to be the kind who's like an elephant near a mouse, convinced that everyone little thing is here to persecute the hell out of them in their own stronghold.

By douche, I mean both kinds, both OC housewifey and post-hipster hipsters, exhaustingly sincere because they're somehow supposed to be as well as tiresomely detached for the same reason, because they're supposed to be.  Which is all a long way of saying that I want my child to not listen to shitty music.

There, I've said it, I don't want my child to listen to shitty music.  Not that I haven't enjoyed my fair share of it in the past, but good lord, if my child's singing "Call Me Maybe" or some Nicki Minaj/Miley Cyrus/Justin Bieber/other lesbian nonsense (not that there's anything wrong with lesbians, it's just these idiots who pretend to be lesbians for provocation's sake) I will set her head spinning with my (metaphorical) backhand.

As a ward against feculent musical tastes, during the last trimester of the pregnancy every evening I played a new song for the baby, while in utero, from my MP3 player, and that became our nightly ritual, me pre-partum indoctrinating my child with my own musical tastes while my wife looked on, amused, knowing that pretty soon I'd be jamming to Raffi like every other dad who's convinced at the beginning that they know better.

Anyway, now that she's ex-utero I'm going to resurrect this ritual for my daughter for as long as it'll last (maybe high school - that's usually when they can drive away from your music).  Admittedly, most of my playlists consist purely of Elliott Smith, so there's actually not much in the way of tastemaking there after all, but anyway, here's a recent song I played for her - yup, Elliott Smith.

Raffi can wait his inevitable damn turn.

A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME?

So naming a child is a funny thing;  almost every parent looks for a unique, but not unusually, alienatingly, read made-fun-of-on-the-playground-for-having-an-unintended-sexual-meaning, name.  Somehow, perhaps because of whatever's in the zeitgeist, most of us end up selecting names that turn out to be the most popular of the generation, and there are so many in a classroom that their taxonomy requires numbering, Laura 1 versus Laura 3, or unique nicknames like Esquiglio Smith, even though his last name is Tanaka.

When told that our daughter's name is Penny, my aunt asked, without a scrap of irony, "why didn't you name her one hundred dollars?" (Okay, maybe a shard of irony, or at least I hope so, since my aunt is Puffy.)  (Wow, I'm now imagining Puffy with a tight perm and a string of pearls....)

I dunno, Benjamin would be an odd name for a girl.

TGIFIRST WEEK

Today marks the completion of our daughter's first week of life!

Of course, that's not an official milestone in childhood or parenting, and although each subsequent week passed may add to one's confidence in your ability to keep a baby alive, they come so at a period so frequent as to be less momentous as the typically celebrated annual birthdays.  I mean, come on, celebrating one's 1,231st second of life is pretty much the same as the 1,232nd.  But still, compared to the grim alternative, we're still feeling a sense of if not accomplishment, at least massive gratitude (to quote Han, "don't get cocky, kid").

I suppose it's a bit like measuring yourself against which of the celebrity marriages your own has outlasted and the silly, but somehow still significant, sense of ease that gives you, so although not an official occasion, hmmm... hey, Hallmark, I think you're potentially missing out on a big market here...

BABY, IT AIN'T OVER 'TIL IT'S OVER

To my dismay I've discovered, now twice over, that when the baby's made a dirty diaper, like any bad news there may be more forthcoming.  Like when she announces that her new self-produced single is about to drop right after she tells you that she's going to major in the liberal arts.

Actually, it's been more than twice;  there was that one time a couple of posts ago (please recall:  shart in daddy's face), and today, two more times.  The first was with a diaper change in the morning, when whilst I was cleaning her she then proceeded to urinate and stool at the same time, the results of which ran up her poor wrinkly little back, prompting a quick spot-cleaning in the kitchen sink.

The second time today was while everyone was out of the house except the baby (who, of course, can't yet drive) and her father (who, of course, probably shouldn't be left alone with a helpless baby, but that's perhaps the subject of another blog, the-father's-father-who'd or something crazy meta like that).  A wet fart not my own signalled yet another rise in the stock price of Huggies or Pampers or whatever diaper it is that we have on hand, so I changed the little one, and noticing some mild redness (perhaps irritation from over-conscientious wiping, perhaps from repeated nasty nappies) decided I'd let her air-dry.  I set her down on the little ballerina-hippo play pad and scurried up to dispatch the diaper.  I picked the baby back up to carry her with me while I visited various parts of the house, and I noticed that the baby-wipe solution hadn't really yet dried on her bottom, which, of course, I realized wasn't cleaning elixir but rather was urine.  I'm still glad that she isn't yet eating asparagus.  Anyway, that revelation didn't quite have the emotional impact of the Keyser Soze reveal, perhaps instead more along the lines of the sinking sensation Kobayashi must feel whenever he looks up at the scoreboard and sees how many dogs he'll have to eat to catch up with Joey Chestnut.  That feeling was compounded when I went back down to the hippo cushion and realized that the trail of urine had actually started there, and that the pachyderm pad had been soaked through with pee.

So the day was spent with bodily second chances, I guess;  the challenge as a parent is to be not so compulsive as to change the baby after every single squeaky fart, but balanced by not allowing your precious child's tender skin to stew in expelled juices, that is, change often, but not to often, not too soon, but not too late, diapering is a zen koan, but unlike meditation it won't bring you inner peace, just raw, chapped hands from washing them all the dang time.

Or, forget all of that stuff above, maybe the point is just that an appropriate alternate title for the post could have been, after the potty is the after-potty.

Perhaps the only part of the baby's body that doesn't excrete stuff that needs to be wiped away.  Yet.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

It was one week ago today that my wife and I went to the hospital to have our baby girl.  Last Tuesday, my wife and I had our last quiet steak dinner, marking the end of the beginning of our family.  The next day, Wednesday, we were admitted for induction of labor, and 56 grueling hours later we met the little one whom we'd only known through ultrasounds and the constant kick-pushing she'd been doing in utero, and now here we are, lying awake nights, eyes wide, wondering if those noises she's making are normal or not and blaming each other for what must be the baby's genetic fartiness.

What occurred to me tonight, a thought that occurs to every adult now and again, is that I will never be able to finish everything I have on my list of things to do, that it turns out that the checklist is written on a Moebius strip - well, a Moebius strip that keeps regenerating... okay, well, you get the poetic point.

That thought (that I wouldn't finish everything, not the Moebius metaphor) came to me when I laid a folded onesie down on a stack of unread New Yorkers on our bedside table, and I realized that I was now back to being a year behind on this reading, and that I'd have to struggle to catch back up, if I were ever able to;  don't get me started on how many issues of Harper's I'm behind on.  I have an e-reader that isnt going to read itself.  Recently, I'd started watching Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations show streaming online, but the childbirth thing put that diversion on hold as well.

I've also been meaning to write a book, or perhaps books, a novel about medical marijuana set in the 90s, a book about the history of emergency medicine, about the history of medcine as a whole even.  There's the promotions packet for work that I have to put together, and although I'll undoubtedly get that done (gotta get to associate), there are a bunch of other things that'll get placed on back burners that apparently are arrayed like a short-order cook's version of a Sartrian afterlife, stretching on and on past an event horizon of indifference.

And this thought, this next one, is still unformed, but I'm beginning to realize that being around for my child, just being around, is what's called for, rather than making it the checklist sort of an action that so many other parts of life

Which sure takes the pressure off of actually getting anything done when it comes to my kid - am I right?

When you're this incompetent, there is no pressure at all.

A REAL TIGHT SWADDLE AIN'T WORTH SHIT IF SHE'S STILL HONGRY

So, although it's my second (and likely not last) title of a scatological nature, this post, at least, has nothing (or at least little) to do with poop.

Since the baby didn't sleep well last night, I didn't either, so here's a quick post about about the mystery of figuring out who this tiny human is and what she wants besides world peace, love and understanding.  And tantalizingly, I'll defer, again, the observations I have about the shared village of the labor and delivery unit and the department store makeup counter.

I don't know if it's always been the "thing", but for a while it seemed that baby books were all the rage of anxious parents, and at present it seems that newborn classes, that cover such topics as basic diapering, bathing, breastfeeding, etc. may be what the cool parents of the kids do now.  One such class my wife and I took was based on Karp's Happiest Baby on the Block book/video/method/cult, and it apparently has its adherents.

This, technique (?), I guess, teaches parents to rely on the "5 S's" of soothing a newborn during what Dr. Karp calls, in the vein of those 5 volume trilogies, the "fourth trimester", and basically calls on the grown-ups to provide for their tot conditions mimicking those of the uterus, minus all of that amniotic fluid.  For fear of violating copyright laws, I won't go into the 5 S's in great detail, but at least so you can have a general idea, in no particular order:

One "S" is shushing, which upon first blush is quite alarming to see in action.  The parent leans over and practically into the ear of the newborn goes, "SHUUUUUUUSHHHHHHHH" - the accompanying explanation is that the fetus hears noises in the womb, including maternal circulation, the outside world, etc., that amount to approximately 70-80 decibles of sound, about the volume of a vacuum cleaner, so imagine activating a vacuum by your baby's tender ear.  The videos make it seem like aural roofies;  the parents lean over and SHUUUUUSH and all of a sudden the wailing infant quiets her sobs and lies limp in her parent's arms.  I did it once while in the hospital:  my wife had finished feeding the baby and was in the toilet, handing our infant to her mother, when the child started crying, and then wailing in the most alarming fashion.  My mother-in-law, who I'd taken as an old hand at this child-rearing thing, having gone through two children and two grandchildren prior to mine, looked up at me with the most stricken look on her face when the baby started shrieking, which should have been alarming to me, but having watched a DVD I was now the pro.  I picked the baby up, rolled her on one side and proceeded to SHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSH in her ear, immediately calming her down while my mother-in-law watched in amazement.  Major magic points.

Another "S" is the swaddle, that is, bundling your newborn tightly in a blanket such that she can't flail her arms and accidentally trigger her Moro (startle) reflex, just as though she were still tucked tightly into her mother's womb (get it?  Fourth trimester!).  The technique they teach is a particular sequence of folds, like origami with an infant, one flap over the right shoulder and down, one up over the left shoulder, a tiiight pull on a wrapping part which is then tucked in to secure the whole affair.  I've noticed that men seem to take particular pride in being able to perform this maneuver, foreheads with a light sheen with the effort of tugging on these blanket ends, holding their bundles out with expressions of self-satisfaction and pride on their faces, now THAT's a tight swaddle, like you see in the movies where a soldier in basic training is able to make a bed with covers so taut that you could bounce a quarter off of it, not that these dads are bouncing quarters off their children, but rather that they take the same sort of pride in it, you get the idea.  I've now become the official swaddler of our infant, that's now my job and my contribution;  when my wife feeds our baby in the middle of the night, sustaining her little life, I can now say that I pick the child up and swaddle her, thereby participating in that life-sustaining work.

But the other night (and it being day five of our child's life, there haven't been many other nights, so to speak), the baby started whimpering, then squawking every now and again, and then crying, prolonged bouts of it.  I stumbled over to her bassinet - let's see, diaper's dry, she fed just an hour ago, let's try skin-to-skin contact.  Nope, still crying.  Okay, time to pull out the big guns and go for the 5 S's, so I swaddled her as tightly as I could, quarter-bouncingly worthy, rolled her over and SHHHUUUUUSHED, but she kept crying, and now I'm starting to worry, the tricks aren't working, how can she have outgrown the fourth trimester in 3 days?  I repeated all of the steps, now lightly perspiring, whose idea was it to have a baby in the middle of the summer?, swaddling her again in what was surely the Mona Lisa of blanket swaddles.  "Maybe she's still hungry," opined my spouse.  "But she just ate an hour ago!" I countered, but as she's usually right about... everything except woodcarving (actually, I don't know anything about that either), I handed the baby over to her, and feeding quieted the infant down, and that was that.

And, it seems, that's what being a parent is like, at least so far, ping-ponging between extremes of competence and resulting confidence - one moment you've outshone your mother-in-law in placating your unhappy newborn with magical incantashush, the next moment none of the tricks of the ancient religion to which you are sadly devoted are working and it turns out you were wrong and she was just hungry.  So like a midget at a urinal, I'll have to stay on my toes...

This is one of my favorite recent memes;  being an academic, I'd like to be sure to give proper credit where due, but I have no idea where it came from, having arrived on my desktop through the internetses.  So, if this is your work, please let me know so I can give you proper attribution and the slice of any pie that may be existant.  If any.

SCARED: SHITLESS

Today was our first full day finally at home, after five agonized days at the hospital.  The degree of agony, of course, is relative - my poor wife was the one tethered to her bed by her c-section wound and  the requirement to feed our new baby, whereas I at least was able to wander around my workplace, sit at my desk and email, mope around the cafeteria, and breeze through the emergency department (where I work as an ER doc) chatting people up all while my brave wife sat in her room trying to figure out how to breastfeed, i.e. sustain our newborn's life, without nipples abused to the point of hemorrhage.

I'll save the curious anthropology of hospital labor and delivery units and how they relate to department store makeup counters for another post.  Rather, I want to expand on the odd parental obsession with diapers and the contents thereof.  I mean, of all the pointless exclamations of pride, the fact that one's squealing newborn spawn has shat his diapers, which, considering that philosophers (or at least gastroenterologists) have claimed that man is but an alimentary tube with eyes, is hardly a reason to claim exceptionalism.  But what the bastards who knew (notice a theme?) hadn't told you is that the reason all of these sleepless mothers and fathers are so enraptured by urine-soaked nappies is that rather than being a boringly quotidian point of pride, those diapers can be a matter of life and death.

What they tell you is that every additional day of life should mean one extra soiled loincloth, so, according to this scheme:  day one, one diaper;  day two, two diapers;  day three, three diapers;  and cetera for the first week, until your child makes about 8 shit/piss diapers a day.  What they don't tell you is what it means if your child, like ours, had 8 meconium (mec is that thick, black slurry that newborns produce that stands in for the feces produced from digested food) diapers the first day with perhaps one urine.  And then doesn't follow the prescribed schedule of one added each day.  And although the doctors and nurses don't seem quite unhappy about it, they use that weird phrase, "well, we'll just keep an eye on it," which has the felicitous economy of using a minimum of extra letters but may sound to a worried, sleep-deprived parent either that nothing's wrong but we're talking about it as though it is, or alternatively, your child is being driven off a metaphorical health-cliff like the Republicans did to the economy while the Democrats watch, waving as the car goes over.  Well, (literal) shit.

The day of our hoped-for discharge finally rolled around, and at that point no one's showered, no one's changed their adult nappies, unwashed hair all thick and oily like a college rastafarian's, and we are ready to go home with our new bundle of joy.  At that point, our child still hasn't made a urine or even meconium diaper since that first day, and we'd only just learned, early that morning from the night shift nurse, some more pro-tips to finally begin to understand how to get the proper latch on the nipple, meaning only since early that morning had our child, like a wall-street banker, been receiving rich reward for all of the sucking that she'd been doing.  On our discharge from the hospital, the parting shot from the well-meaning pediatrics intern was, "just be sure to keep an eye on your baby's wet diapers - although, of course, you're a doctor and all, so I don't have to say that!" even though you did, you cruel bitch.

Yes, I'm a doctor, not only am I a doctor, I'm an attending physician in emergency medicine, a faculty member in a school of medicine's department of emergency medicine, meaning not only do I practice it, I teach others how to do it.  And there have been countless nights filled with frazzled parents of newborns with whom I've sat and counseled and examined and ultimately deemed their child, thankfully normal.

My point being that when I'm doing my job, I know this stuff.  Being on the receiving end of it, only further clouded by the paranoia of knowing what could go medically horribly and catastrophically wrong, made it perhaps worse.  Good god - I just noticed that our baby's lips are a little chapped-appearing, is she dehydrated and I haven't noticed?  Her skin turgor is normal, what about her capillary refill?  Why hadn't she made another wet diaper today, anyway?  We were supposed to go home...

And then, magically, we were discharged home, we had good follow-up the day after next, the baby appeared well, and after all, we were given the injunction to be sure to keep an eye on it.  That first evening home was spent being spent, the group of us huddled and shakily moving from one thing to the next, one feeding to another.  The diapers they gave us at the hospital had a color-change indicator that would turn from yellow to green in the event of a urine (event!  Excretion has become an event!), and as the late afternoon turned into evening and then into night, we'd examine the yellow line which remained unironically so feeding after feeding after feeding, the worry that I was killing our child with dehydration building, that perhaps I shouldn't have pressed so hard for discharge and instead had remained in the hospital, hair turning into dreadlocks a small, small price to pay for the life of our daughter.

And it was so even this morning when we went to feed her again.  Sighing, we decided to change her diaper anyway as it had been on for a day.  My wife's mother and sister, who are visiting and shouldering the bulk of the burden of keeping house while my wife recuperates and feeds our child and I blog, were at our bedside telling us of their plans while this changing was occurring.  The old diaper was off, every part of her nether bits freshly and sadly cleaned of nothing, when, miracle of miracles, my beautiful child peed into the air, all of us crowing delightedly at the yellow stream of wellness and non-dehydration and sweet vindication for being home and above all, proving that this diaper meant life and death, and this time, life won!  We were so proud of our little one's dirty deed, shitless this time but we were no longer pissing in the wind, sweet victory!

ADDENDUM/POST-SCRIPTUM:  This evening, after another long day of clean diapers, whilst changing a mec-streaked one I had the fortune of having my child alternate between stooling and urinating on the chux pad I'd set below her, followed by her sharting in my face.  This shit's getting old...

Why yes, that is a baby in my shirt.  But I am happy to see you - how'dja know?

PARENTING: DAY 1

It's common wisdom that parenting is tiring but what the bastards who are in the know don't tell you is that the exhaustion starts on the goddam first day, no, wait, it starts two nights before when you arrive at the hospital for the induction of labor and overnight, every 30 to 45 minutes someone else knocks or swings open the door to take vital signs or give you a form to fill out or check the linens or check the cervix, and the first night is spent sleepless too because of the anticipation of finally getting to see your little one the next day.

The problem is when the next day becomes the next night and the cervical dilation and effacement progress and your brave wife's labor is accompanied by the terrifying decreasing pitch of fetal decels, and you have to refrain from whispering under your rank breath, "put the oxygen on, goddamit," because the first clause would be tender, but it'd be hard to explain that the damnation of god is meant for this situation, when you arrive at a point that all labors somehow share, the moment that your terrified loved one looks at you, pleading for help and you can't do anything, all of your influence and work at the this very same medical center don't mean shit because no one's returning your pages and what are they going to do anyway, are they somehow going to magically change the asynclitic positioning and arrest of progress?

Exhaustion gives me vertigo, as I've discovered over the past couple of years, and I have become oddly accustomed to feeling the world spin off its axis over the past few days, striking at will.  "Oddly accustomed" would be a great travel-blog, "oddly accostumed" would be a welcome store around Halloween.

The fatigue sits next to you while you wait for the docs to come and talk to you about the cesarean section, it sets next to you instead of on you because the vertigo tilts everything off kilter, while you silently pray, at 2 in the morning suddenly stricken by the realization that you could lose your family in one fell stroke, your pregnant wife and expected daughter, and you don't ignore, you wallow in the knowledge that so many prayers seem to fall on God's ultimately deaf ears, an understanding that you've approached by realizing that prayer doesn't change things, it changes you, but you're finally wise enough to realize that you rarely want to be changed.

And then, in the OR, sitting behind a curtain with your wife's oddly disembodied head, body hidden by blankets and drapes, all you can think of in your exhausted mind is of the Wizard of Oz and whether there's actually a c-section going on or if some sly Midwestern grifter is just pulling levers, until they hold up an actual baby, covered in actual vernix, a little hairy but by no means the karmic response to own of your funnier med school anecdotes, and while they close your wife you and she put your faces close to your child's.  Three twenty five AM, the 3rd of August, 2012, 5 pounds, 10.7 ounces, 18 inches tall, your little girl.

And then during the day you make the 45 minute to hour commute back home that you always make, same assholes, different cars, only this time to pick up your mother-in-law, who'd been waiting by the phone in your house since arriving from Syracuse two days before, and then you drive back to the hospital, and you spend the day delirious with comparisons of eyes and ears and lips and expressions, and then you drive your mother-in-law back, and then you drive back again because your family is actually still in the hospital because of the c-section, and that's where you need to be, with your family, and at some point you realize it's Day 1 of being an actual parent, when the rules change and now they've changed you.

And now I'm a writer fueled by the drug of exhaustion.

This is what terror looks like:  me wearing a clean, AKA "bunny", suit over my street clothes so I can go into the OR where my wife is about to go under the knife for a c-section.