Thoughts from week 2 of fatherhood

Okay, first substantive post . . .

Most of the time I'm thinking this blog will be for short stories about the day, but this post will be longer, as a collection of thoughts I've jotted down over the past 2 months. 

I recently read an account of army life, written by a schoolmate in Iraq who has been there for a month. The details were fascinating, and reminded me how new experiences force alternate perspectives on the world and engage the human brain in remarkable ways. We are wired to attend more closely to the novel aspects of our lives, and have an uncanny ability to filter out and forget the routine. It also reminded me of the value of sometimes putting our thoughts down on paper to share or revisit.

And, this partially fits within the theme of a TED Talk I just saw, "Pursuit of a Memorable Life."  Basically, you should try to maximize the number of out of the ordinary experiences you have on a regular basis, because these are the only experiences that will prompt memory formation. 

The remainder of this post was written in late March.

I'm now just over a week into fatherhood, and needless to say, I've been having a lot of these new experiences. In the past 9 years of managing our 2-person lives, Annie and I have worked out a lot of strategies to keep ourselves organized and generally on top of things. Here are a few thoughts and observations from the past weeks, along with some of our techniques for keeping a semblance of control over our lives.

Diapers: Believe it or not, I made it 31 years without changing a diaper. It's not that I ever refused, I just never ended up in a situation where it became necessary. After 11 days, I've probably now changed 70+ diapers. It isn't terrible (perhaps you've done it yourself), but doesn't smell great, causes baby to fuss, and has some risks.

The first few days after birth, each dirty diaper was a reason to celebrate, as it signaled normal biological function and the ability of baby to flush bilirubin (liver toxin) from her body and to start putting on some weight. By now, we've established that we are getting . . . sufficient biological processing, to the tune of over 15 diapers a day on occasion. The primary entertainment now is to watch and listen for the moment baby is dirtying her diaper.

There is nothing like the first time your child sits on your stomach, gazes (lovingly?) into your eyes, then furrows her brow suddenly and blasts a rumbling, watery crap into her diaper. It is a feast for the senses. Your stomach feels something it never has, you chuckle uncontrollably at the sound of frothy discharge, and the smell wafts quickly to your nose.

And sometimes, you are lucky enough to have even more of your senses engaged. After Maggie's latest blast one afternoon, I looked down at her on my lap and noticed she had entered a fugue-like state. Wide, unblinking eyes, expressionless face, and totally relaxed body. Perhaps the release of internal pressure had done it. She looked pretty hilarious, but I shouldn't have been laughing. I soon felt a flow of warm liquid onto my bare stomach and down onto my shorts. The sight was more shocking than the feeling, and I didn't need to check the color-changing indicator line to understand what just happened.

There was no warning about this on the diaper packaging, only the implicit message that everything would be sufficiently contained. "GentleAbsorb Liner with hundreds of tiny absorbent pillows to help draw mess away from your baby's delicate newborn skin." Or, perhaps away from my baby's skin meant directly onto mine? I'm now taking precautions against this possibility going forward.

Also, watch out for the diaper aisle at the grocery store. A casual, "Can you grab some more diapers?" leads you into the depths and confusion of styles, sizes, features, multi-packs and jumbo packs. And the ultimate downer, there are no deals in this aisle. We move to cloth diapers soon, so we'll be greeting a new set of challenges.

Everything has its place: We don't like to waste time searching for items in our house, so everything has always had its place. The rubber mallet hangs next to the hammers, light bulbs go on a basement shelf, and whisks and spatulas get separated into different kitchen drawers based on usage. Items should be stored close to their place of use, with accessibility based on frequency of use. Our bulk bags of cereal stay about 5 feet from the breakfast table, and wine glasses are in a cabinet so high up I need a stool to reach them.

The massive accumulation of baby products over the past 9 months has stress-tested our approach. So many questions. What is this? How often will we need it? These two items look similar, but is there some nuanced difference in the way they will hold or soothe? This automatic rocker also plays rainforest sounds, but is that more soothing than the cuddly sheep stuffed animal that can play ocean sounds OR 'Mary had a little lamb'? Do we want 30 blankets and burp cloths (necessary by the way) all in one spot or strategically placed around the house?

Without an actual baby in the house, we could only speculate. We just stuck everything in the upstairs nursery, mostly tucked away. Now that we've had Maggie around the house for a week, we have data rolling in and have gotten strategic. The living room now has a sleeping/changing station with some baby-holding items, diapers and wipes, extra clothes, garbage and laundry. Automatic rockers are positioned in several different rooms to provide on-demand relaxation. All feeding supplies (bottles, nipples, pumping equipment) stays by the kitchen sink in the day and upstairs bathroom sink by night. It is a lot of work keeping things in their place, but the net result after a week is that most of the house remains minimally impacted by our new house guest. 

Sleep: For the last 9 months (and as far before that as I can remember), my sleep schedule has basically involved falling asleep at 10 or 11ish, and sleeping until it is time to wake up, around 6am. As we got closer to Maggie's birth, our young parent friends and coworkers started the refrain of "get your sleep now!" or something similar. I didn't really take these warnings to heart.

After a week of being home, we've fallen into a new schedule that attempts to balance our own sanity with ensuring Maggie gets nourished. The conventional wisdom is that newborns need to eat every 3 hours, regardless of whether they are actively asking for food. This means that at 2am, when you should be in solidly in the middle of your night's sleep, you are instead trying to feed someone who has no interest, and is busy sleeping (like a baby). 

We get to bed around 9pm now. Annie takes the first shift in the nursery, sleeping when she can, tending to Maggie when she fusses, and feeding around midnight. Meanwhile, I'm in our bed, trying to get some good sleep knowing that my wake up call is coming at 2 or 3am. Once we pull the shift change Annie tries to grab 4-5 hours of sleep, and I tend to Maggie. This works, and amazingly we're still able to function okay during the day, but all parties involved hope this is temporary. Once baby gets a bit larger, we'll shift to just feeding on demand, and we are planning to allow Maggie to experiment with some self-soothing (ie cry it out) once she reaches an age where that approach is supposed to be effective. For now, we get additional time to bond with her in the middle of the night.

Stockpile staples: I read a while back that money spent loading up on basic household items can be a reasonable investment as a hedge against inflation. We've always done something along these lines with toothpaste, tissues, etc., but ratcheted up our commitment to this approach over the past few months. We have 2 dozen rolls of paper towels (this fills the back of the car), almost as much toilet paper, 10 sticks of deodorant, 1 gallon of liquid hand soap, thousands of garbage and zip-lock bags, and enough laundry detergent to last almost a year. As long as everything has its place, this strategy works well, and segues into the next strategy.

Shift activities to non-peak times whenever possible: When you anticipate busy times ahead, it is always a best practice to find activities that can be pulled forward out of that non-peak time. Thinking ahead to baby's arrival, we knew we didn't want to be spending time running to the grocery store to get essentials that ran out. Hence, the stockpiling. We wouldn't have time to cook fancy meals, so we filled our freezers with lasagna, soup, and more, and also had a Meal Train set up by our wonderful family and friends. 

Now that Maggie is here, peak times are basically feeding and night times, where everything takes on a heightened sense of urgency. Do you want to be measuring out 3 oz bottles of water to make formula at 2am? No, you make up all these pre-measured bottles during the day. Do you want to be frantically washing bottles as baby is screaming for food? No, make sure all dishes are completed before you move into a peak period.

Baby clothing: Why do babies need clothing? I haven't really gotten a good answer to this question. To keep them warm? No, a blanket or swaddle cloth works fine. To be cute? Eh, maybe, but I'm not sure it is worth it. Because they like wearing clothes? Ha, you must be kidding.

From what I've seen, babies seek liberation from the various impositions we thrust upon them, especially clothing. Hold them down when you are changing them, and they will squirm. Put on a cute hat, they will wriggle out of it. Attempt to thread a small hand with splayed fingers through the narrow sleeve of a onesie, you will meet resistance. For these activities, adult strength and persistence typically wins the day, and thus you do observe babies with fresh diapers, clothing, and hats on occasion. Mittens, however, are a completely different story. Babies fling mittens off of their hands like an 1,800 lb bull flings riders. Eight seconds is a fine showing in either case. Mittens would be helpful at night to prevent babies from scratching themselves, so we instead settle for pajama arms and a tight swaddle.

And a few notes on clothing fastening technology. Snaps are okay. Magnets are cool, but seem to stick better to the tumbler of the dryer than to their intended targets. Velcro is great. The technology  but gets stuck to everything else in the laundry.

Looking ahead to the next weeks, months and years, it is exciting to anticipate so many firsts, new experiences, and changes in our family!

New Blog!

Annie and I have been talking about getting a blog of some kind going to record interesting thoughts and anecdotes from our lives now that Maggie has joined us. We aren't committing to any kind of regular schedule, but are hoping this can serve as a simple, Google-supported tool to forever capture some memories. Here we go!