Beauty of the Beast

Newborn babies are cute, cuddly monsters that warm your heart and devour your soul. I learned this in the early hours of May 17 when Lola forcibly expelled one of the little devils from her uterus. If you want to know how the process went, lock yourself in a small room with an angry fat lady who bleeds a lot. Twelve hours later, have someone bring in a seven-pound alarm clock that poops. Our little girl, who will be known as Betsy for the purposes of the website, came into this world with a full head of hair and an even fuller bladder. She used the latter to great effect, managing to soak Lola, the hospital bed, and me within her first thirty seconds of life. As I stood there, saturated with urine and joy, it occurred to me that I’m woefully unprepared for parenthood. Despite having a solid nine months of warning, I somehow managed to let my daughter sneak up on me like an adorable Chupacabra stalking a goat. Every parent I’ve ever talked to assured me having a baby would change everything, but for some reason I assumed they were all lying. It’s unfortunate that I failed to recognize the honesty of my fellow man until well after my fiendishly lovable progeny escaped her uterine lair.

Betsy in her natural state: cute, helpless, and full of evil.

It didn’t take Betsy long to prove correct all those people I chose to ignore. She has yet to assume the sleep patterns of a typical diurnal omnivore. In the middle of the day, she could sleep for hours upside down on top of a cactus and never make a peep. At night, however, if Betsy is anywhere other than in her mommy or daddy’s arms, she’ll wake up every five minutes and scream like she’s being mauled by a pack of angry badgers (and it doesn’t matter how well you’ve badger-proofed your home; when you’re a nervous new parent, every sound your baby makes really does mean “Help, I’m being viciously attacked by local wildlife”). Rather than jumping out of bed twelve times an hour, I’ve started taking Betsy into the other room during her late-night bouts of insomnia and playing video games while she falls asleep on my lap. One night in her first week home, I spent four of the six hours I was supposed to be sleeping instead practicing this parenting-by-neglect technique. It’s been a long time since I’ve slept this little or played Xbox 360 this much. Having a newborn is a lot like being in college again, only now the most popular girl in the room ends the night by soiling herself. On second thought, it’s exactly like college.

Betsy doesn’t like being stripped down and photographed. This bodes well for her teenage years.

I’ve heard more than one young parent say they wish children came with instruction manuals. They do. There are millions of words dedicated to the topic in books and websites easily accessible to anyone in the western world. I know this because Lola approached parenthood like she was cramming for a big exam. I also approached it like I was preparing for a test; Lola and I just study a little differently. She read everything she could find, while I pursued an aggressive regimen of procrastination in the hope that a potent cocktail of panic and Wikipedia would bail me out at the eleventh hour.

I may not have read any parenting books, but I wasn’t totally unprepared for my offspring. I did excel at don’t-have-sex-ed at my Catholic high school. My classmates and I were given computerized dolls that cried until someone turned a key in their backs. Our time with the dolls was supposed to scare us into abstinence by teaching us how hard it is to care for an infant, but all we really learned is that babies stop crying if you put them in the freezer.

Kitchen appliances aren’t the only danger infants should fear. Based on what I’ve learned second-hand through Lola, here’s a quick summary of everything that’s ever been said or written about newborn care: everything will kill your baby. For Betsy, sleeping on her stomach, sleeping in the same bed with Lola and I, or just sleeping in general are all considered equally lethal. In fact, napping is the number two killer of babies in America. Number one, of course, is badgers.

As part of the universe’s eternal balancing act, everything is a threat to newborns, but newborns are also a threat to everything around them. A few days today, I was changing Betsy’s diaper when she decided to poop, pee, and spit up – twice. That’s six bodily expulsions in less than two minutes. By the end of the process, there wasn’t a piece of cloth in the room that wasn’t permanently defiled. For father’s day, I’m asking for a Hazmat suit or at least some kind of rubberized parenting smock. I guess Betsy managed to keep something in, though, because she did gain weight by her two-week doctor’s appointment. When she was born, Betsy weighed 7 lbs. 6 oz., but that quickly changed when she started spewing liquids like a BP oil leak. When Lola and I finally succeeded at making Betsy gain weight, I was somewhat saddened by our success. I now have massive 7 lbs. 10 oz. baby. She’s only been home two weeks, but she’s already growing up.

If she was two ounces lighter, we would have had to throw her back.

I started this article two weeks ago and planned to have it finished in the first few days after Betsy’s birth, but it turns out babies take a lot of time. This contradicts my original plan, which called for Lola to do all the work while I filled my days with beer drinking and nap taking. It hasn’t helped that lately Lola has been as much work as the baby. Apparently I was mistaken in my belief that all pregnancy-related insanity came to an end the exact moment Betsy’s oversized head wedged its way into the world. I can say this without fear of retribution because I’m pretty sure the same forces that make Lola hormonally unstable also make her functionally illiterate. Remind me to delete this paragraph before Lola goes back to work. Lola and I are both worn out from the whole baby experience, but overall things are going well. The baby is gaining weight, Lola is losing weight, and I haven’t seen a badger in the house in at least thirty-six hours. We’ve only been at this for more than two weeks and we’re already practically professionals. Lola might feel differently, but I say bring on child number two.