Month: April 2003

It’s 5:30 AM. I’m wide awake, having just endured the most harrowing diaper-changing experience so far in my short career as a parent. It’s a good time to reflect on what I’ve learned to date….

• You can never predict when the baby will come, especially when you are convinced that it couldn’t possibly come yet.
• There’s a reason they call it “labor.”
• Dads: If you agree to cut the umbilical cord on your new son, just be careful where you angle those big scissors. Leave circumcision to the experts.
• Once you’ve smelled it, everything smells like baby formula.
• Try not to ponder the implications of having a McDonald’s restaurant inside a hospital.
• Babies are neither as fragile nor as durable as they appear.
• Don’t burp the baby while wearing your favorite shirt. Or sitting on the brand new sofa.
• Yes, your baby really is the cutest in the world. Just don’t expect everyone else to see it.
• Try not to envision a dairy farm when your wife is pumping breast milk. At least, if you do, don’t tell her about it.
• A pack of 80 diapers doesn’t last as long as you’d think.
• The health insurance industry has an inscrutable logic all its own.
• Plan for everything to take twice as long as you expect it to. Then it will take approximately twice as long as that.
• Your physical coordination really is affected by sustained lack of sleep. Keep that in mind when your toes are exposed to large, heavy, moving objects.
• Having a baby is a good way to instantly enhance your popularity. Don’t let it fool you — it’s not you they’re interested in.
• There is no way to convey to a non-parent the pure joy you feel at the sight of a stinky, sticky mound of poop in a diaper, after a day and a half without one.
• Your thoughts at 5:30 AM are neither as lucid nor as profound as they seem.
• It’s all worth it. And then some.

5. Coneheads

I did know about this for several years before my son was born, but I still wasn’t really prepared for it. Naturally, since the plates of the cranium have not yet fused in a fetus, and the birth canal is fairly tight to negotiate, the head tends to get stretched like dough being rolled out. The result is a distinctively pointy shape. My advice… do not dress your newborn in a sleeper that looks like Beldar’s pajamas. It may seem funny at first, but it really only makes things worse.

4. The fountain (boys only)

When we learned we were going to have a boy, lots of people started warning me to be sure to “cover him” while changing his diaper. I understood the premise, but it wasn’t until I saw it in action that I really understood how important it was. Fortunately, no one was in the line of fire.

3. The smell of formula

Baby formula has a very peculiar smell. In fact, it seems to be an amalgam of many different smells, each of them peculiar in its own right. The only one I’ve really been able to differentiate is potatoes. I haven’t checked to see if any potato-derived substances are actually in the formula, but there is definitely a potato-like smell in the mix. One thing is certain though: once you’ve smelled baby formula, everything smells like it.

2. The umbilical cord

OK, I actually learned this about 6 months ago when my niece was born, but it was still quite a shock. I always had this impression that the umbilical cord was completely removed at birth, but in fact a little stub of it remains attached to the baby’s abdomen for several days to a few weeks. You have to swab it with alcohol to stave off infection, and day by day it gets more shriveled, harder, and discolored (not that it was a pretty color to begin with). Our baby’s umbilical stub fell off about 2 weeks after he was born, and SLP compared the detached remnant to a crusty bit of chicken that was stuck on our barbecue grill for a week.

1. Meconium

What is “meconium,” you ask? It is nothing short of incontrovertible proof that babies are aliens from a world far stranger than our own. Merriam-Webster describes it as “a dark greenish mass that accumulates in the bowel during fetal life and is discharged shortly after birth.” Yes, in fact it is a dense, sticky, green-black, tar-like substance that fills a newborn’s diapers for the first two days or so after birth. Its most distinctive trait, however, and one you don’t even really appreciate until the “regular” bowel movements begin, is that it is devoid of odor.