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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