A rant about babies and cars.

Scenario: you've spent 20 minutes getting an infant ready to go out for a trip to the grocer and drug store, and you are finally ready. After putting on a fresh diaper, slapping on a set of going-out clothes, taking them off because they got immediately barfed on, slapping on another set, and making sure the diaper bag is packed with the proper amount of diapers, extra clothes, extra bibs, tools of baby distraction, milk, and the right sling, you are ready to go. Wait, now he's hungry. So you feed him, change the diaper again, settle for going out with puke on both of you, and you are once again ready to go. You get your precious little 20 pound package of man-flesh strapped into his 15 pound carrier, limp out to the car, click it into the carseat base, and BAM! Time to hit the road.

Wait ... no ... where's the diaper bag? Darn! You left it inside! So you quickly run back and grab it.

STOP! HOLD IT! You mean you just left your baby unattended in the vehicle for fifty-two seconds? What were you thinking? You might as well have left him in the dishwasher or in the middle of an exhibit of angry starving hyenas! What if you had locked your keys in the car and could do nothing but stare helplessly through the window drooling on yourself? What if a carjacker had stolen your car out of your driveway? What if your four-month-old had managed to squirm out of his carseat, put the car in drive, and run it into a lake? What if you had gone inside and DIED? You are a failure and a disgrace! You should be in jail! I'm calling the cops!

Seriously, now. Why are people so outrageously bad at risk assessment? It is bad enough that I can't drive the .5 miles down the 30 mph pedestrian road to the butcher's without packing my child into Megatron. If I can't leave him alone inside his Iron Man chair for the moments it takes to run inside for something I forgot or pick up my pizza from a counter that is less than 25 feet from my car on the other side of a wall of glass, I'm at a loss. I might as well just curl up around him in a fetal position inside of a cocoon of breathable blankets and cower under the bed waiting for Quaker extremists to kamikaze into my house with a dirigible

Four Months.

As I sit here in the sun with the window open behind me, rocking from side to side to keep Ephraim happy in my sling, it is hard to believe that it has been four months since cold and dreary D-Day. Kerry has recovered from the fourth degree tears of childbirth. We've survived a Christmas Eve pyloromyotomy. And four months of reflux puking! We've completely altered our diet. We've already had our first smiles, coos, nonsense talking, and rolling... We've spent a fourth of his life to date to, from, and in Arkansas. He has more than doubled in size. I've transitioned from being the night-shift parent using my foot to keep the bouncer bouncing while watching the TV on very low volume to being the day-shift parent struggling to keep the little guy entertained with toys, dances, songs, laughs, and bottles.

It has been an adjustment, and there are many more adjustments ahead. But we're figuring things out. We're surviving. And most of the time, we're content.

At this point in time, nothing makes Ephraim happier than me playing Tunak Tunak Tun and dancing like Daler Mehndi. It is weird. He also really, really wants to crawl but hasn't figured out what to do with his arms yet. So he just kicks at whatever surface he is on and scoots his head and torso along with his arms dragging behind. Between that and rolling, he is surprisingly motile. We've been saying that we're going to have to start baby-proofing soon, but I guess we really need to do it now. :/

Things I Miss.

What do you give up when you become a parent? It is a question I see crop up every now and then on reddit. Four months in, here's what I miss most:

1. Sleep. I miss the quantity, quality, and reliability of sleep. It really just goes out the window in all of those regards. Tiredness is staved off by coffee and tea, and you only get to stay one step ahead of exhaustion if that.

2. Food. Or should I say cooking? Cooking elaborate meals might be the single most baby-unfriendly activity possible. You have to be involved and attentive. You can't be interrupted. It involves fire. So it doesn't happen. Goodbye elaborate soups, cast-iron pans, and deliciously savory dishes. Hello generic and easy main courses accompanied by pre-cooked Trader Joe's potato products.

2.5. Eating. Meals are no longer things to be savored and enjoyed. They are to be consumed as rapidly as possible, broken up into shifts so that we can pass the baby back and forth and give each other opportunities to scarf.

3. Computer games. I knew it would be bad. I knew that my hobby was going to take a pounding. I didn't know the extent. I thought I'd be able to snatch an hour's worth of Civ, Minecraft, or FTL in a day. And for a while, before Kerry went back to work, I *did* manage to squeeze in 5 minutes here, fifteen minutes there on some simple (read: only requiring one hand) PC games  throughout the day. Now that Ephraim is grown up enough to demand absolute constant attention unless he is asleep, though, gaming has become an occasional round of bejeweled. That's pretty much it.

4. Reading. I know there are people who don't have a problem picking up and dropping off reading a book in ten minute chunks or less. I am unfortunately not one of them.

5.Freedom to "go." We can't just decide to go somewhere anymore. It takes planning and preparation to get out the door--is the diaper bag packed, is he freshly fed, is he clean, do his clothes fit the weather? It takes planning and preparation to hang out somewhere else--do we need the carrier, the stroller, the Katan sling, the chest-pack, a blanket or boppy to put him down on, do we plan on breastfeeding or should we take a bottle? And it takes planning and preparation to figure out what the sacrifice is (because there always is one) to going out--are we going to be out after bedtime, is this going to mess up his napping or feeding pattern, what chore is going to go undone in order to gain X amount of time?

6. Being alone. Truly alone. Even when I'm asleep, I'm connected to the baby through the monitor. The closest I feel to actually being alone is when I'm driving around with him in the carseat. It calms him to reliable silence...and even if he did get fussy, there wouldn't really be much to do about it.

And now his nap is over, and so is this list.

Incidental Finding

My right knee is a lemon. This has been apparent for a long time. Osgood Schlatter syndrome brought an abrupt halt to my budding interest in track and field in junior high. Sometime between then and my graduation from college, an ossicle grew into my patellar tendon and sharded off. Seven times. So to all those who judged me for using elevators, bleaurrrgh. After Kerry and I got married, I had them surgically removed and the front of my tibia shaved down. Entering early adulthood with a severely malformed knee and chronic tendonitis, I didn't figure I'd never be running a marathon.

Moving to Massachusetts helped. A lot. Arkansan heat and humidity had me relying on a cane, leaving work early around once a week, and sighing any time I saw stairs. The relative cool dryness of New England has helped the pain significantly. But it has never left. Waxing and waning chronic hurting just becomes a part of you after a while. Always there, like mosquitoes buzzing around your ears when you are trying to camp under the stars. Sometimes you can bury it deep. Other times it wakes you up at night and it is all you can do to keep from sobbing. But you deal with it. You writhe a bit, let your body contort a few times, shed a couple tears, pop four ibuprofen, maybe quaff a beer, and try your best to concentrate on anything but explosions, flames, stabbing, construction work, or things cracking open. 

Babies, however, are not kind to knees. The rocking, bouncing, kneeling, lifting, and going up and down are taxing. Toddlers and beyond are even less kind to knees, and this has been my single biggest dread of fatherhood. Whenever I played with my friends' son Parker, I'd pay for it with sleepless nights and shuffle-steps for the better part of a week. Now I have my own, and I dread not being physically able to keep up, to walk more than half a mile, to chase him around the yard, to play catch, and all that dad-and-boy stuff.


For the last nine months, my PCP has been experimenting with steroidal injections in different places (below my patella, behind my patella, directly into my surgical scar) in an attempt to alleviate the issue. Since it hasn't worked, I got to relax in the cool, white magnetic resonance tube last Sunday. As Kerry and I pored over the images of my jagged, weird-looking knee bones, it never occurred to us to look behind the tibia. So my doctor's prognosis on Monday was a bit of a surprise: yes--you have fluid buildup all in your knee joint, and no there is probably nothing to be done for that, but we are going to have to get a CT scan to figure out what that growth coming out of your fibula is.

Kerry and I went back to the images, and sure enough: the front and side of my fibula was covered with all sorts of black splotchy badness. And so from Monday to Thursday, we waited. I wasn't very phased. After all, to find the C-word in a knee that had already been through so much would be like shooting at a deer in the woods, missing, and accidentally killing a jackalope instead. I was imagining a fluid cyst that could be drained. Kerry, on the other hand, was apparently extremely worried without telling me. The relief when she told me about the radiological reports on Thursday evening was a tangible thing: probably either a benign enchondroma or hemangioma.

My actual doc confirmed what my wife doc told me on Friday: I have a benign cartilaginous tumor growing out of and into the top of my fibula. So the good news is that it is not malignantly out to end me! The bad news is that my knee is now even worse off than I thought. Usually these things are asymptomatic, but this one probably isn't. Probably, because it is hard to localize any pain in my knee due to its intrinsic screwed-up-ness.

So the plan of action as of now is to wait a month until my annual checkup. Wear a knee brace. Do the minimum with my knee as I can possible manage. Ascertain whether the pain/functionality trade-off is worth it. And if it isn't, get a bone scan to a) find out if there are any more and b) inform possible surgical options that it would be best to avoid. It is too big and too embedded to just remove, so options are limited. Bone grafts, possibly. Or in the worst case scenario, the fibula is an expendable bone.

So yeah. It could be worse. Much worse. I'm very grateful it isn't. But damn it stings to go from "Oh hey we're finally going to figure out how to make this better" to "You need to decrease your activity even more to keep this from flaring up."

All-nighter

Last night, something miraculous happened. Ephraim went down in less than an hour and then slept for a solid nine. I could hear him over the monitor waking up at his usual feeding times, but he just muttered, sighed, whined a little bit, and went back to sleep.

Unfortunately, I spent the last four hours of his nice long slumber awake. A combo of knee pain and apprehension for the never-coming moment when Ephraim *would* wake up in a tizzy kept me from falling asleep again after Kerry's middle-of-the-night pumping. Here's hoping that we get a repeat performance!

Teetotaling

This post is a public commitment so that I have someone besides myself to whom I can hold myself accountable. Because let's face it: it is easy to go easy on one's self.

Alcohol is bad for me. Not because I abuse it. Not because it violates a religious restriction. Not because it turns me into a mean person. No, alcohol is bad for me because I have chronic reflux problems. Because my lower esophagus is in less than ideal shape and my duodenal chamber has little nodules of stomach tissue that have migrated there. Because if I don't manage my reflux and indigestion issues rather carefully, my digestive health is just going to get worse. Because yesterday I drank one Woodchuck cider and ended up chucking it up (heh heh) in the shower.

So despite my deep and abiding love for beer and brandy, they have to go. All of it has to go, completely. All it takes is a little bit of any kind of booze to make me miserable a few hours after, so moderation won't work. I have a small bottle of sack mead brewed for me by a dear friend that I've been aging for good while. Tonight, I drink it, save the cork, and hop on the water wagon.

The whole sleep thing.

Whelp, the second full week of stay-at-home-dadding whilst Kerry dithers her time away being one of the most brilliant child and adolescent psychiatric fellows in the nation is nearly done. This week's trial: sleep.

As long as the sun is up, life is pleasant enough. When darkness falls, though, it gets pretty hard not to lose my shit. As evening gets closer, the cloud of dread creeps nearer and nearer: bedtime. At least forty-five minutes and maybe as much as two hours of grueling, uncertain strategizing to try and lure Ephraim to some semblance of sleep that will last more than eight minutes. Inevitably rinsing, repeating, and starting over with the feeding, bouncing, humming, feeding, patting, singing, feeding, reading, crying, crapping, and feeding until it finally sticks and I'm too frustrated to fall asleep anyway. Every. Single. Night. Add three night-time feedings before we have to get up and around to see Kerry off to work, and it is easy to see why Ephraim *is* the monster that haunts my nightmares.

And since we are coming up on that four-to-six-month period during which it becomes more or less acceptable to start some sort of sleep training depending on what literature you read, there are decisions to be made. In one corner, we have the no-cry insane people who rally around a singular Psychology Today article that has given rise to the idea that if you leave your child--at any age--to cry for any more than a minute, you have caused irreversible neurological damage that will inevitably turn your baby into a neurotic, emotionally rejected sociopath. In the other corner, we have parents who would just rather let their babies cry than take care of them.

Somewhere in the middle there is a solution that will work for us. I lean more toward "start self-soothing training early" because I've just always been pretty high on the sleep needs scale myself. I want my eight hours at least. The one time I tried to stay up all night as a kid, I only lasted to the wee hours of the morning. I fell asleep the next day babysitting my little sister. That led to one of the biggest chewings-out of my older childhood, which I consequently have no recollection of because I slept-walked through it.

Kerry, on the other hand, has soldiered through med school, residency, and now fellowship like a champ. And even in the worst of times, she'll elect to read rather than sleep until it is absolutely necessary. Not to trivialize her own need for rest, but she copes worlds better than me with sleep deprivation at baseline. Add in mommy hormones, and she is a machine. She'd probably be happy waiting for the full night of sleep to come naturally even with the understanding that things might not get any better for years.

It would be convenient if tonight is the night he goes down like a rock at eight o'clock and doesn't wake up until well into dawn. Here's hoping...