Never, never, never wake a sleeping baby. Especially if she’s mine.
Babies
Parenting in five words or less: #2
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5.5 True Facts About Newborns
Let’s just get something straight: newborns are weird. Now I’m not trying to take away from the magic that is growing another human in your abdomen for the better part of a year, but if I’m being honest, a fresh newborn is as close to an alien life form as there is out there. With their pointy heads, puffy eyes, spindly limbs and inability to communicate, they are about as mysterious as a Chupacabra, and about as scary, too. So let’s try to clear up some of that mystery. Here are some true facts about newborns.
1. Baby poop is not really poo-like at all, but instead is nearly the exact consistency and color as the liquid that always squirts out of the mustard before the actual mustard makes an appearance. It can travel great distances in short periods of time, and defy the laws of gravity. Much like the “magic bullet” that somehow (tragically) passed through JFK and Governor Connally but remained nearly unscathed, baby poop can escape the confines of both a diaper and a onesie, and make it all the way into your pants, all without soiling either the diaper or the onesie. Your pants, however, will be quite soiled.
I’m more of a dijon kinda girl myself.
2. Speaking of doodoo, once your newborn achieves Fecal Magician status after getting their poop in your pants, you will discover that much like dogs and bees, wipes can smell fear. And when they smell fear, the all stick together thereby making it impossible to remove just one or two. Without fail, one semi-aggressive tug will yield 15 wipes in a string of unscented, cleanly dampness, further exacerbating the panic as cool poo dribbles down your thigh. So calm yourself before you ravage your wipe container. You are probably going to need an actual shower.
Alakazam! Check your pants!
3. Baby heads have a Go-Go-Gadget like ability to stick out a few inches more at a moments notice, like when you are walking through a door frame. Even when you think you have your perfect sleeping newborn all tucked safe and secure in your arms, somehow they find a way at the exact moment of crossing the threshold to secretly stretch their head out just in time to smack it on the edge of the door frame. They then retract it, equally as secretly, leaving you to believe it was actually your fault for carelessly slamming their delicate skull into a solid piece of pine. Amid the shrieks of your discontented baby, you stop and look down to see how it just happened, and by all accounts, it shouldn’t have. But thanks to Go-Go-Gadget Concussion Spring, it did. So don’t feel too bad. It happens to all of us.
Babies are just like this, except the trench coat, top hat, and gun.
4. The amount of milk in, is not directly proportional to the amount of milk out. In a mathematical equation that rivals the classic “If a train leaves Provo at 2:00 pm going 56 miles per hour…” it is somehow true and factual that 2 ounces of milk in, is the equivalent of roughly 15 ounces of milk product out. It doesn’t matter what end it is coming out of, the ratio remains the same. And when you start solids, the equation is doubled. 2 ounces of pureed sweet potato in equals no less than 30 ounces of putrid sweet potato even a short time later. Don’t ask me how. It’s obviously science.
This little lady was given exactly 1/4 cup of milk, but with the help of science it becomes a full gallon.
5. Newborns have a sixth sense that allows them to determine when you are hungry, thirsty, or have to pee. It is then, and only then, that they will fall asleep in your arms after refusing to sleep anywhere else. This sixth sense also allows them to know when you are planning on taking their picture, and gives them enough time to stop whatever they were doing, and instead make a face that looks like they just took a shot of Fireball.
Just enough antifreeze to keep it interesting.
5.5 Babies can possess you. Somehow, with all the barf, and poo, and peeling skin, and constant needs, you will still find yourself absolutely transfixed by this little being. Over a year later we still find ourselves staring at Baby 1.0, and reveling in even the most mundane of details with the enthusiasm of someone who just won the Mega-Millions jackpot. “Oh my God, baby, just look at her eyebrows! She’s getting eyebrows! Oh and the way her little elbow is just like ‘I’m a little elbow!’ I can’t take it!” If this seems unlikely, I will tell you that girl scouts honor, I was obsessed with watching her eyebrow hairs grow in. Why? Because she possessed me. Which will make it all that much harder in 16 years when she plucks 2/3s of them out, and inevitably spends a few years looking perpetually surprised.
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Cover image source: http://midatlanticgardening.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/et.jpg
The Big Bang: Thoughts On How I Became A Mother
For however different the birth of Baby 1.0 was compared to how I thought the birth was going to be, actually holding her tiny body and gazing down upon her perfect face induced a feeling I couldn’t have imagined I was capable of. While she was technically my first human child, she was hardly my first mammalian infant responsibility, as I’ve fostered enough baby animals to claim dual-citizenship with the animal kingdom. When they look up at you, their little paws clutching your fingers while you bottle-feed them, your heart swells. Or at least mine did. But when cradling our little babe for the first time, my heart didn’t just swell; it did the human equivalent of the Big Bang (the cosmological event, not the T.V. show, or the South Korean pop band). And from that explosion, a new state of being was formed: A giant emotional gas cloud composed of sticky, intoxicating love, a hefty smattering of fear, a few black holes of depression, and countless little glimmers of pure joy. This new feeling, which will henceforth be referred to as “Motherhood,” was completely and utterly life changing from the very first second she was set in my arms.
thewestsidestory.net
This is my heart, exploding all over, making a big ol’ mess out of motherhood.
Speaking of which, from the very first second she was set in my arms, Baby 1.0 started crying. It was to be expected, in those first few seconds, or minutes I suppose. But it continued. For a long time, which is a story for a later post, but I’m mentioning it now for the 15 people who read this regularly, so they won’t say “but you didn’t mention the crying after she was born!” She cried, y’all. From the get-go. Aside from the monsoon of baby tears, there were a few other unexpected discoveries right from the beginning. Perhaps one of the most shocking, our baby was born with what could only be described as troll toenails. They were tiny, or at least they had the capacity to be tiny once trimmed, but they were long and pointy, and caught me by surprise, literally. They would snag my very chic hospital gown when I was awkwardly maneuvering her about to give her the proper amount of “skin-to-skin”, or nurse her. Even with my new galaxy-sized mother heart, the feeling of them scraping across my abdomen was enough to gag me a little. “Learn how to trim toenails” was quickly bumped up to the top of the extensive list of ‘Things To Learn How To Do.’
Cute baby toes! I googled “Troll Toenails,” which I regretted immediately. Don’t do it. I dare you.
Our two days in the hospital flew by. The nurses were extremely attentive, and would happily do anything from bring you a juice, to join you in the bathroom once you discovered you had peed and couldn’t get up. They offered a smorgasbord of great pointers, many of which contradicted each other, but at least then you always felt like maybe you weren’t doing it wrong. For two days we ooh’d and aww’d Baby 1.0’s every movement, and diligently recorded her meals and corresponding diaper deposits (turns out there is an app for that). We put up the requisite “Meet Our Baby” Facebook post, and received more well wishes than we knew what to do with. It was an idyllic time, minus of course, the crying. Our comfort level grew from fear on par with handling a dangerous snake, to a place where we could safely determine which end was up, and which end was most likely to spray liquid on us.
And then, just like that, our stay was over. At 11am on the dot, our nurses switched from caring best friend mode, to border patrol guards and booted us with the efficiency of a fast food line cook. It wasn’t until after I’d dressed in actual clothes for the first time that I wished I’d heeded the unsolicited advice of a client a few weeks earlier. “Bring baggy clothes to go home in,” she’d said, with a knowing smile. In my head I’d sneered and thought, “I will be skinny again then, you insufferable clown.” But after wrestling my bread loaf-sized combination ice-pack/pad into my yoga pants, I understood what she meant. We collected our things and waddled our way down the hall towards the car, half expecting a slow-clap, but instead being fully ignored. I’m not sure if maybe everybody there didn’t know I had just birthed a freaking human, or if they just didn’t care, but either way, I think at the very least, I deserved a slow-clap.
Put this in your pants. Or use it to make French Toast, but definitely don’t do both.
We walked out of the hospital into the hot, July, midday sun, and my mind was flooded with a wave of unexpected worry. The sun! Get her out of the sun! The pollution! Oh dear God, why do we live in a city? It’s so loud! WHY ARE YOU HONKING, ASSHOLE?! We got her in the car, and very slowly and very nervously drove away. My husband was at the wheel, admittedly more nervous than when he took -and failed- his first driver’s test (for the record, he is an exceedingly safe driver, and passed his test on the very next try). Fortunately, we lived about 4 minutes from the hospital, so our journey home was very short and uneventful, even when going 15 mph.
And then we were home, and we were three (or six if you count our three pissed-off cats, seven if you also include my mother-in-law who was staying with us for the week. Also we had a fish. Eight. We were eight). Just like the Big Bang, there was no going back now. Life as we knew it was brand new, and hurtling towards an unknown future at an immeasurable speed.
Little Baby 1.0, pondering the meaning of life. Or pooping.
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I am not a science person, or at least in the sense that I know all the ins and outs of the Big Bang Theory. I’ve done a bit of googling about it over the last week, but I’m sure I made a mess of it when using it as a metaphor. Maybe the speed is actually measurable. Maybe black holes didn’t happen right away. I dunno. But just go with it. Or feel free to tell me about it.
The Second Trimester: A Goodish Time To Travel Internationally, A Bad Time To Do The Milk Challenge
If the first trimester felt like an extended trip to the amusement park from Hell, reaching the second trimester felt like a lovely stroll through a picturesque meadow. One filled with rainbow-colored hummingbirds, and a buffet of free cinnamon rolls and lasagna. The nausea finally relented, and when I woke up in the morning I actually felt awake. This was a welcomed change, and I whole-heartedly embraced feeling like myself again. I relished in my expanding waist line, and actually believed people when they said “You look so good!”- a pregnancy lie I caught on to deep in the third trimester when I did not, in any way, shape or form, look “so good!” It was in the second trimester we found out we were having a girl, and felt her unleash a series of violent kicks – the first of many to come. It was also when we decided to throw caution to the wind, and travel internationally.
You can imagine our surprise when we were told we were having a girl, and then this picture was handed to us .
Right around the same time we discovered we were pregnant, my husband’s parents purchased tickets for a family vacation to Ireland. To say his family is “well-travelled” would be doing them a serious injustice. They seemingly spend more time abroad than stateside, so a trip to Ireland for them was on par with going to the corner store for a jug of milk. We are, to put it simply, total travel opposites. I would classify myself more of a lounger than a doer, while they are a family of doers, from a long line of doers who at some point in time, many generations ago, invented doing. My ideal vacation would include a chair, a baker’s dozen of piña coladas, and the ocean. They, on the other hand, are more the type to cut down a tree, hand-carve a canoe, paddle said canoe to a distant, uninhabited island, and forage for mushrooms, all while singing Peter, Paul and Mary songs. Nearly 9 years later, I find this quirky trait equal parts terrifying and endearing; an intriguing combination that keeps me following them into thickets of woods, propelled by curiosity and mild panic. But with all of that said, I still had confidence I’d be able to keep up, and excitedly awaited our departure date (I should clarify that by “keep up” I mean sit in the car and eat yogurt covered rice cakes while they hiked through bogs, without anybody being able to say anything. Spoiler alert! I was right.)
Five days before we were supposed to leave, the Boston Marathon Bombing happened. We were living in Providence, Rhode Island at the time, and were supposed to fly out of Logan days later. The tragedy hit too close to home, and in my overly emotional state, I was a ball of nervous and sad energy. Fast forward to the day of travel, and I was a jittery fool. Standing in our kitchen waiting for our ride to the train, I noticed we had a little less than half a gallon of milk. Never to be one to waste something as precious as milk, I playfully said to my husband: “Milk challenge?” I poured myself a pint, and he started swigging from the jug. A few rushed gulps later, the nerves and ridiculousness of the situation hit me, causing me to laugh uncontrollably. I choked, gagged, threw-up, and then full-on peed my pants on the kitchen floor, just as our ride was pulling into the driveway. This incredible, messy feat not only reduced me to tears (of laughter), but it also brought my overall maternity pants count down to two, and reset my “We’ve had no accidents in the pants for ___ days” counter to zero.
For however rocky the trip began, the vacation itself was incredible. Ireland is a beautiful country filled with a rich history, that even in my most hangry state, I could still appreciate. The people were warm and welcoming, the food was wonderful, and the Guinness, well it looked incredible. My in-laws were very understanding of my needs, and didn’t make me feel bad when I wanted to sit and eat Quiche at the gift shop, rather than explore the Cliffs of Moher. They also turned a blind-eye to my hormone related temper tantrums, and supported my need to pee every 20 minutes by stopping anywhere and everywhere so I could cop a squat. It was truly a wonderful trip. I left Ireland with a camera full of pictures, and a new double-chin that would stick around and serve as a reminder of the obscene amount of Irish butter I consumed, for nearly 2 years.
Greeting us upon arriving back in the states was the TSA and the Third Trimester, both equally anxious to rob me of my travel high. Ready or not, our little fireball was going to be here before we knew it. But first I had to survive a New England summer in a three-story walk-up with no air conditioning.
They were sitting so far from me because they were afraid I was going to eat them.
The First Trimester, A.K.A. When I Became A 30-Year-Old Toddler
Remember when you were a little kid, and on one very special summer day, your parents would take you to the amusement park? You would get there early, and survey the scene like a conquistador on the shores of a far away land. The possibilities were endless. Sun-baked, and sugar-filled hours would fly by as you spun, twisted, dipped, and flipped your way through the park. And then suddenly, somewhere between the Gravitron and the Tilt-A-Whirl, it would hit you: Sheer exhaustion, coupled with cotton-candy induced nausea, and a fountain of tears as your parents spurred you toward the car for the long drive home. This was my first trimester in a nutshell, but rather than lasting one day, this was how I spent three glorious months.
On what would be the equivalent to the first ride of the day at the amusement park, it became clear I was something of a Joey Chestnut of morning sickness, except for every hotdog he would consume, I would produce an equal amount of morning barf. Most often, my walk to work would trigger my tummy troubles, where I would then deposit my breakfast in what I came to think of as a very hungry porcelain baby bird. “Here ya go, Buddy! I’ll be back in an hour or so!” The worst part wasn’t having to stick my head in a public toilet, but instead having to pull my head out of the public toilet, wipe my red, blotchy face off, and go interact with the public without tipping my hand that I just reverse ate an Eggo waffle with peanut butter. For the rest of the morning I’d be spending equal amounts of energy trying not to gag, and working to keep a 3 foot distance from anybody who may be able to detect the Eggo I’d just leggo’d.
This is Joey Chestnut, by the way. A competitive eater of many things, including hotdogs. Photo from http://www.worldofpctures.com/joey-chestnut/
The body-crushing, brain-melting, fall-asleep-while-standing tired didn’t wait long to settle in either. I punctuated conversations with horrible, drawn out, tonsil-exposing yawns. Yawns that inexplicably, were always accompanied by a single tear, as if opening my mouth wide enough to swallow a grapefruit was putting too much pressure on my eyes. In a confusing twist, sleep didn’t seem to help this hybrid monster of tired. I would wake up in the morning like the Swamp Man stumbling out of the murk, bug-eyed with a gaping mouth, garbling words incoherently. It was all I could do to get through the day before coming home to collapse on the couch, begging my husband for a bowl of cereal and 4 glasses of water. If there really is such thing as a sleep bank, building a baby threw me into the red faster than a freshman coed with daddy’s credit card.
And then there were the tears. Soon after getting pregnant, crying seemed to become part of my daily routine. While it would be gracious to assume the exhaustion and nausea were to blame, in reality I think they were second-tier contributors to a much larger problem: Being pregnant turned me into a 30-year-old toddler. Patience and understanding were replaced with frustration and confusion. Simple transgressions, like say, leaving 1/16th of an inch of milk in the carton and knowingly putting it back in the fridge, would send me into a tearful rage. Because why? This river of emotion didn’t take much to well over when I encountered touching stories, or kind words either. Songs took on a new meaning, and the card isle at CVS became a no-no zone. Even reading the words “To My Beloved Great-Aunt…” in some swirly, silver font could do it.
But with each passing week, we got closer and closer to the second trimester, and to be fair, it wasn’t all bad. We got to hear the babies heartbeat for the first time, which fell somewhere on the spectrum between unicorns singing, and successfully teleporting. We got to see the baby on an ultrasound, and while we couldn’t confirm it wasn’t actually a turtle, it did give us a sense of how real this all was. I also started to get an itty bitty baby belly, which prompted me to take my first ever (and possibly my only ever) selfie. And even more importantly, reaching the second trimester milestone meant: 1). Our risk of having a miscarriage dropped significantly, and 2). Pretty soon, we could post it on Facebook…
It’s an itty bitty baby bump selfie!
Well That Happened Quicker Than I Thought…
I imagine finding out I was pregnant was similar to how Dorothy felt when she first woke up in Oz. Overnight, I had been magically transported from the familiar territory of “Just Me, Myself and I,” to a new, unknown land called “Us,” where something was living inside my abdomen. This realization froze me to the toilet, pee-stick in hand. The moment had no Hallmark warm and fuzzy. There were no tears, or squeals of joy. Silently something shifted, and it was immediately understood I was now the keeper of a tiny ball o’ cells, for which I was responsible. In the seconds following the discovery of two pink lines, my brain actually completed about 3,587 different thoughts about what this meant, all culminating in “And somehow the baby has to come out...”
But before I could really get ahead of myself, I needed to tell my lovely husband. While I was taking the only test that would actually change my life, he was busy putting the finishing touches on a lecture he was giving to 300 undergrads in a few short hours. This was a first for him, and to say he was nervous would be an understatement. Knowing this, I thought about not telling him until after he finished, but fun fact about me, I am incapable of keeping secrets. Undecided if I would spare him the extra stress or spill the beans, I washed my hands and headed upstairs. I (we?) walked into the kitchen with what I thought was a neutral look on my face, but in actuality was probably a wide-eyed look of panic and excitement, similar to what a raccoon looks like in a live-trap: “Yay! Achieved peanut butter! But now stuck?!...” He looked up at me, dropped his shoulders in disbelief, and said four words I’ll never forget: “Shut the fuck up.” While it wasn’t exactly the reaction I was looking for, it was also totally acceptable, even though I had actually not said anything. It was shocking news, and people say funny things under duress. He stood up, gave me a hug, and I suggested we pretend this didn’t happen. He then went to work, and I went to get a hair cut. It was as if nothing had changed, but everything had changed all at the same time.
That night we processed it a little more, and were both over the moon thinking about all the possibilities. What would it look like? When could we take it for casual walks around the neighborhood? Could it hear my thoughts? It was more exciting than I could have possibly imagined, and I forced my excitement on people who I felt should be equally as exuberant. Like my sister, who was going through the final stages of an unexpected illness with their beloved family dog. I called her, and she was crying telling me about the grim prognosis they had just received. In what may have been my most dismal show of humanity yet, I hit her with a one-two punch that went a little like: “That totally sucks. You should put him to sleep. But guess what?! I’m pregnant!” If saying rude, horrible, untimely things to people you love was an Olympic sport, I had just completed a 4 minute mile. She tearfully said “Congrats,” but probably thought “You will ruin that child if you can’t learn to control your impulses, you insensitive little Twit.”
Breaking the news to other family members was also somewhat of a mixed bag. Some were decidedly more enthusiastic from the get-go, while others said things like, “Is this really the way you are telling me you are pregnant?” But eventually, everybody caught baby fever and shared in our joy. And by “joy” I mean frequent, unexplainable, bouts of crying and ragehate directed at things like the toaster oven, and the latch on the screen door. Other than my new-found abhorrence of inanimate objects around the house, in the days following the positive test, nothing really felt that different. “See!” I thought to myself, “This is a cake walk! Oooh cake… I should get some cake. I deserve a cake. Wait, why don’t we have any cake? Oh my God, why hasn’t somebody baked me a freaking cake? Hello?! I’m BUILDING A BABY OVER HERE!! I’m going to freak out if I don’t get a cake in 3…2…OOOH! We have CHEESE! I will eat all the cheese.”
Hold Me, Don't Hold ME 
