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....
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Saturday, August 25, 2012
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...
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...
Actually, confession: this is probably what we woulda been doing on a Saturday night four weeks ago too...
Friday, August 24, 2012
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
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
Thursday, August 23, 2012
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...
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...
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
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?
Monday, August 20, 2012
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).
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).
Sunday, August 19, 2012
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.
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.
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.
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| We made this. (Image from imgur.) |
Saturday, August 18, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, August 16, 2012
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...
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Monday, August 13, 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, August 12, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, August 10, 2012
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...
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...
Thursday, August 9, 2012
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.
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.
.JPG) |
| Perhaps the only part of the baby's body that doesn't excrete stuff that needs to be wiped away. Yet. |
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
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?
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. |
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
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...
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...
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| 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. |
Monday, August 6, 2012
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...
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...
.JPG) |
| Why yes, that is a baby in my shirt. But I am happy to see you - how'dja know? |
Friday, August 3, 2012
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.
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. |
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