Dear Mr. Baby:
I have thrown some parties, memorable mostly in their occult and cryptic aftermath, that I call vaguely to mind today. There was the Halloween party of 2005, where, inspired by recently watching Breakfast at Tiffany's, I sauntered around my university apartment encouraging everyone who came to smoke cigarettes in holders and wave their arms around quasi-elegantly like stage actors on a movie set, and woke up to thousands of explicable but still improbable yellowish holes burned into the sides of candles, a shoe I did not own, and the plastic frame of an Ansel Adams photograph that had been in the closet. In 1996, I could not find my coffee maker to ward off the ill effects of a social engagement involving the first and last keg of beer I will ever buy, only to find it (the coffee maker) several days later, dripping Coors Light onto a bed from the ceiling fan where it had been placed with intricate and almost engineered care. The night I refer to as The Saki Night, the remnants of which trapped newspapers and trash in a sickly sweet death grip for weeks to come, all over the house, I assume because I declared at rather imbibed and uninhibited point in the evening that all saki must be drunk hot! but did not have the equipment, experience, nor sobriety to properly execute such a plan. Interestingly, most of the saki seems to have been spilled in the bathroom.
March 2011, one of many days indistinguishable from others: there is a trail of wheat-free snacks on the counter dribbling away into large, tongue shaped splotches on the floor. The dog is wobbly and disoriented. Everything the kitchen is half-done; drawers, in various states of aperture, ooze things like dishcloths and cleaning products and duct tape, partially unrolled. My keys are in the refrigerator, dangling into an open jar of pickles. There is a destroyed stick in the middle of the living room. I lost my phone (but found it, in a fortunate turn of events, prior to restarting the dryer.) A variety of blankets and shirts are everywhere covered in splotches of vomit. A plant has fallen over, from a perch where nobody can even reach to water it. There is underwear all over the place, just all. over. the. place. It looks as though a carnival of socially irresponsible people, with a penchant for brightly colored junk and an obsession with the words Oink! and Chirp! came through here.
It's just like old times, Mr. Baby, except nobody is drunk (except maybe the dog) and nobody really had quite that much fun. Furthermore, and I find this to be the most illusive aspect of the condition of my house - nobody who has properly functioning appendages, aside from me, was even here, which, by default, makes me irrefutably responsible for the mess. It's 8 o'clock, and I have no idea what happened with this day. Or why, given that the kitchen looks like the midnight snack preparations of a drunk, I didn't eat lunch or dinner.
I'd ask you what happened, but you just say phleble and aaaaag over and over and over. To be frank, you're as useful for intelligence gathering as a concussed parrot.
Here are some things I do know happened:
I let you play with a plastic bag, because I distinctly remember thinking about that. I remember feeling rather seasoned at that point, like one of those soldiers on their third tour somewhere, who just walk around in a nonchalant dispassion, ostentatiously not ducking even though there are grenades exploding everywhere. I just thought, rather lethargically: Oh hey look at that. You're so definitively, quintessentially, being a Bad Mother right now. (For the record, you just really showed a lot of interest in it. It's yellow and crinkly, which are two of your favorite qualities in people and stuff. Also, I eventually took it away).
I made a list of all the things I would buy if people would just give me two actual cents instead of universally useless hypotheses as to why you scream a lot. On it, a lifetime supply of earplugs.
There were blithe times too, kicking your crib critters and singing great songs of my own ingenious composition, like Who's awake and chewing on his blanket? and What's wrong with the baby now? That may have been yesterday. Today may have been more of a Tough Times for Tiny Guys day. Either way, there was probably a lot of all that and I'm sure it was the height of tedious fun. It's best if you do it in a variety of styles and somewhat accurate accents. Tone-deaf Australian Raised In Germany Rap, Operatic Indian Who Learned English In Jamaica, Proto-European Country and Western.
Beyond that, who the hell knows what happened here for twelve hours. I can only see the aftermath, and ponder the wonder of it all.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Advice-22
Dear Mr. Baby:
According to the advice we're getting, we're very much on track, not at all.
It's best, after four months, to let you cry in your crib until you exhaust yourself in order to facilitate getting you on a schedule. We must not have a limit for crying at bedtime or you will be taught nothing more than to be a big crybaby. You cannot, because of your level of neurological development, establish bad habits yet, so it is very important to never let you cry for more than an hour, and you should be carried everywhere to keep you from crying. When you give up crying, it's because you have stopped trying to communicate with me, to the detriment of your communicative development, the speed of which is indicative of nothing, and is also a barometer of your general well-being. In fact, it's actually bad parenting masquerading as tender affection to rock, sway, or console you to sleep, because it impedes your learning to fall asleep unassisted and will sow the seeds of terrible sleeping habits, and you will be a sullen teenager who dresses in black and fights the establishment. Furthermore, you will ruin your vocal chords if you cry hysterically, which is simply a sign of being overtired, and I must make sure to allow you to go to sleep at that point by not interfering because there is no case of a baby anywhere who injured himself merely by crying. Naturally, this is neglect.
You can't be spoiled right now, it's a myth. So, if I console you, I will be teaching you terrible habits about manipulation, and you will live at home until you are thirty. At this time, you should be sleeping in another room, to avoid developing problems with separation anxiety, which will set in soon. Additionally, you should be in the family bed until you are ten to build your self-esteem and reduce anxiety. Family beds will increase your chances of SIDS and asphyxiation, so you should never sleep in our bed. You need to hear my heartbeat and you need stationary sleep, so I should carry you and place you on a flat surface to sleep. Sleeping in a stroller, car seat, or wrap is unhealthy for reasons not fully disclosed, but very scientific and containing many cryptic acronyms. Acronyms are indicative of truth. On that note, you should always be carried around, because it reduces crying as evidenced by studies of African mothers. In short, you should go to bed by six, and whenever you appear tired, and you should develop your own sleep schedule.
Confused? It's because you're only four months old and your favorite word is phbleble. Stay with me.
I should never leave a bottle in your crib for you or you could choke, and you should be left with a bottle of water, much like a gerbil, so that you know something is there but cease to awaken for night feedings. In fact, you should never be given a bottle. It's a good idea to start you on bottles now because your father should help you with feedings, and eventually you will need them for day care, which you should never go to because it is full of germs and bad people, and it would be doing you a disservice to avoid because you must socialize. I should never ever give you any water or anything but breast milk for six months, and because you have colic you should have some tea. All of these things could potentially lead to death. Additionally, the doctor said we could start you on solid foods. No babies in the developing world are weaned until they are three, four, and seven, and breastfeeding past the age of one is psychologically unsound, especially in France, where they rub wine on babies' lips to quiet them, which will cause North American women to be morally vacuous and generally rotten people.
You should sleep through the night and wake up twice to feed. You should eat before you go to bed to get you through the night but you should never eat before sleeping because of your incoming teeth, which will dissolve. Baby teeth do not come in immediately precisely because babies nurse to sleep. You should eat every three hours. Regarding feedings, I should feed you whenever you want to avoid dehydration and failure to thrive. I should make sure you get on a schedule, which is evil and Western and something that no one ever had before clocks were invented and should never be done if it can be avoided, because Western things are no good for you until you are about twenty. Plastic, for example, even if carefully concocted to react with absolutely nothing in the known universe, is terrible, and we should try to get a pacifier so you don't suck on your thumb (for the sake of your teeth), and nursing for comfort is a highly effective soothing method. But you should never nurse to go to sleep (again, for the sake of your teeth). The main thing that will save us is swaddling, which will give you a sense of security and destroy your posture, as evidenced by Russians, who are terrible ballerinas.
This is just the eating and sleeping. Don't even get me started on your pre-pre-pre-pre-educational needs, which we are dangerously behind on.
So I think, or at least what I get from all this, is that you should be wrapped up in a hemp sack-cloth and hung by a window with organic sunscreen on, and we should drop some rice mush in there once in a while and speak Mandarin to you so that you have perfect pitch.
According to the advice we're getting, we're very much on track, not at all.
It's best, after four months, to let you cry in your crib until you exhaust yourself in order to facilitate getting you on a schedule. We must not have a limit for crying at bedtime or you will be taught nothing more than to be a big crybaby. You cannot, because of your level of neurological development, establish bad habits yet, so it is very important to never let you cry for more than an hour, and you should be carried everywhere to keep you from crying. When you give up crying, it's because you have stopped trying to communicate with me, to the detriment of your communicative development, the speed of which is indicative of nothing, and is also a barometer of your general well-being. In fact, it's actually bad parenting masquerading as tender affection to rock, sway, or console you to sleep, because it impedes your learning to fall asleep unassisted and will sow the seeds of terrible sleeping habits, and you will be a sullen teenager who dresses in black and fights the establishment. Furthermore, you will ruin your vocal chords if you cry hysterically, which is simply a sign of being overtired, and I must make sure to allow you to go to sleep at that point by not interfering because there is no case of a baby anywhere who injured himself merely by crying. Naturally, this is neglect.
You can't be spoiled right now, it's a myth. So, if I console you, I will be teaching you terrible habits about manipulation, and you will live at home until you are thirty. At this time, you should be sleeping in another room, to avoid developing problems with separation anxiety, which will set in soon. Additionally, you should be in the family bed until you are ten to build your self-esteem and reduce anxiety. Family beds will increase your chances of SIDS and asphyxiation, so you should never sleep in our bed. You need to hear my heartbeat and you need stationary sleep, so I should carry you and place you on a flat surface to sleep. Sleeping in a stroller, car seat, or wrap is unhealthy for reasons not fully disclosed, but very scientific and containing many cryptic acronyms. Acronyms are indicative of truth. On that note, you should always be carried around, because it reduces crying as evidenced by studies of African mothers. In short, you should go to bed by six, and whenever you appear tired, and you should develop your own sleep schedule.
Confused? It's because you're only four months old and your favorite word is phbleble. Stay with me.
I should never leave a bottle in your crib for you or you could choke, and you should be left with a bottle of water, much like a gerbil, so that you know something is there but cease to awaken for night feedings. In fact, you should never be given a bottle. It's a good idea to start you on bottles now because your father should help you with feedings, and eventually you will need them for day care, which you should never go to because it is full of germs and bad people, and it would be doing you a disservice to avoid because you must socialize. I should never ever give you any water or anything but breast milk for six months, and because you have colic you should have some tea. All of these things could potentially lead to death. Additionally, the doctor said we could start you on solid foods. No babies in the developing world are weaned until they are three, four, and seven, and breastfeeding past the age of one is psychologically unsound, especially in France, where they rub wine on babies' lips to quiet them, which will cause North American women to be morally vacuous and generally rotten people.
You should sleep through the night and wake up twice to feed. You should eat before you go to bed to get you through the night but you should never eat before sleeping because of your incoming teeth, which will dissolve. Baby teeth do not come in immediately precisely because babies nurse to sleep. You should eat every three hours. Regarding feedings, I should feed you whenever you want to avoid dehydration and failure to thrive. I should make sure you get on a schedule, which is evil and Western and something that no one ever had before clocks were invented and should never be done if it can be avoided, because Western things are no good for you until you are about twenty. Plastic, for example, even if carefully concocted to react with absolutely nothing in the known universe, is terrible, and we should try to get a pacifier so you don't suck on your thumb (for the sake of your teeth), and nursing for comfort is a highly effective soothing method. But you should never nurse to go to sleep (again, for the sake of your teeth). The main thing that will save us is swaddling, which will give you a sense of security and destroy your posture, as evidenced by Russians, who are terrible ballerinas.
This is just the eating and sleeping. Don't even get me started on your pre-pre-pre-pre-educational needs, which we are dangerously behind on.
So I think, or at least what I get from all this, is that you should be wrapped up in a hemp sack-cloth and hung by a window with organic sunscreen on, and we should drop some rice mush in there once in a while and speak Mandarin to you so that you have perfect pitch.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
No words
Dear Mr. Baby:
There is a scene in Contact, the film adaptation of the Carl Sagan novel of the same name, in which Jodie Foster stares into the fathomless corners of the universe and, awestruck by the enormity and the exquisite beauty of it all, gazes, stricken, saying "no......words.......no.....words...." and opening and closing her mouth in teary, dramatic silent gapes.
I refer to this particular cinematic snippet because I think it best sketches an image of my inner self (with only a few modifications - I weep in disbelief, like Jodie Foster, and in awe and amazement, but of a more negative, a more grotesque, a more olfactory kind; I sense that which awes me not with my eyes but with my nose and with the amygdala or wherever the memory of all tortured smells goes to rot and brand itself to the mind) whenever I open your diapers to a poop these days. There are simply no....words....(tears)....no.....words.....(open mouth)....to describe it.
Perhaps to start we should discuss the general dismay I feel that so much of my life is now dedicated to discussions, albeit short, of fecal matter. Whether it has come or gone, its consistency and color, its size and shape. I have a Master's degree in not one but two platitude-generating fields - I used to be a favorite dinner guest, charming and witty and fairly current on political affairs. Now, I just spend a lot of time fretting about your excrement, Mr. Baby, and I'm trying to cut back. But this, the latest, un-freshest hell, I think we must discuss.
Before, you pooped a lot, and that was a (fairly legitimate, I think) cause for complaint because, well...there was a lot of poop. We spent what I consider to be a disproportionate amount of time in the laundry room, singing a cloying song I call "Pants Check'' whose lyrics really only embody two or three more words beyond that. This song can also easily be arranged to be "Pants Change'' if the need arises. A lot of feet (yours) and hands (mine) and noses (dog's, and occasionally someone else's) got sticky-pooed, and there was a lot of hand-washing and trash and yellowish stuff everywhere, with certain people trying to act cheerful but sounding more like they just walked out of The Feminine Mystique and couldn't find any Valium. Fred barked a lot. I don't know why.
Yes, when you were a wee little lad, you pooped fifteen times a day, and that is not an exaggeration of any kind. I had to write it all down for the doctor, and I always report the numbers honestly. Now, I don't know if doctors do the same thing to a baby's poop reports as they do to alcohol and cigarette reports, which, since you're new to the scene, is this: multiply by three in case someone ''forgot'' something. But she seemed duly impressed. You, Mr. Baby, were in the upper percentiles of pooping, frequency-wise. Stratospheric, vertigo-inducing rankings.
When you gradually reduced your output, and after I got over being nervous and perplexed and checked the Internet to make sure it was a-okay if you didn't poop for two days and then also called TeleHealth and my mother, I was of course quite pleased. It seemed to me at the time that less frequent pooping meant fewer, shall we say, mishaps. Fewer adventures, fewer emergency clothing changes. Fewer tornadoes of baby wipes and profanity, fewer games of Twister in attempts to keep things unadulterated, fewer contortions of the face remeniscent of The Scream. Less false, shrill giggling and me saying, good poop! vacuously, obviously not meaning it, not meaning it all.
Oh, but I wasn't thinking, and some of our readers more seasoned, more sage, those who have had children are already shaking their heads affectionately, for they know. Perhaps they are thinking of that time when they too were jejune fools, new to baby poop and unwise to the ways of the world. Still brimming with optimism and hope, clinging to that silly, fluttering dream that life will return to something normal. Someday. If only the poop will stop.
It turns out - and of course this is all quite logical in retrospect, and hindsmell is 20/10 Mr. Baby - it turns out that you don't actually want the poop to go on hiatus in anyone's bum. It turns out that human feces, left fermenting for several days, actually just takes on a horrifically fetid odor. One could say that it actually evolves in there. When, after several days of squirming and grunting and turning red and wringing your little hands while I act as your doula, you finally birth this little monster, Mr. Baby, there are no. words. to describe it, there is nothing to compare it to, there is simply not a hyperbole hyperbolic enough to capture the essence of this stench. It's additionally, although not at all unexpectedly, ironic that you began this nasty fermentation process right after we switched to cloth diapers. Thanks for that.
So to summarize my thoughts on this Mr. Baby, if you feel like going back to more frequent evacuations, that would be met with no small amount of joy and fanfare. Please. It's really, really gross. Really.
There is a scene in Contact, the film adaptation of the Carl Sagan novel of the same name, in which Jodie Foster stares into the fathomless corners of the universe and, awestruck by the enormity and the exquisite beauty of it all, gazes, stricken, saying "no......words.......no.....words...." and opening and closing her mouth in teary, dramatic silent gapes.
I refer to this particular cinematic snippet because I think it best sketches an image of my inner self (with only a few modifications - I weep in disbelief, like Jodie Foster, and in awe and amazement, but of a more negative, a more grotesque, a more olfactory kind; I sense that which awes me not with my eyes but with my nose and with the amygdala or wherever the memory of all tortured smells goes to rot and brand itself to the mind) whenever I open your diapers to a poop these days. There are simply no....words....(tears)....no.....words.....(open mouth)....to describe it.
Perhaps to start we should discuss the general dismay I feel that so much of my life is now dedicated to discussions, albeit short, of fecal matter. Whether it has come or gone, its consistency and color, its size and shape. I have a Master's degree in not one but two platitude-generating fields - I used to be a favorite dinner guest, charming and witty and fairly current on political affairs. Now, I just spend a lot of time fretting about your excrement, Mr. Baby, and I'm trying to cut back. But this, the latest, un-freshest hell, I think we must discuss.
Before, you pooped a lot, and that was a (fairly legitimate, I think) cause for complaint because, well...there was a lot of poop. We spent what I consider to be a disproportionate amount of time in the laundry room, singing a cloying song I call "Pants Check'' whose lyrics really only embody two or three more words beyond that. This song can also easily be arranged to be "Pants Change'' if the need arises. A lot of feet (yours) and hands (mine) and noses (dog's, and occasionally someone else's) got sticky-pooed, and there was a lot of hand-washing and trash and yellowish stuff everywhere, with certain people trying to act cheerful but sounding more like they just walked out of The Feminine Mystique and couldn't find any Valium. Fred barked a lot. I don't know why.
Yes, when you were a wee little lad, you pooped fifteen times a day, and that is not an exaggeration of any kind. I had to write it all down for the doctor, and I always report the numbers honestly. Now, I don't know if doctors do the same thing to a baby's poop reports as they do to alcohol and cigarette reports, which, since you're new to the scene, is this: multiply by three in case someone ''forgot'' something. But she seemed duly impressed. You, Mr. Baby, were in the upper percentiles of pooping, frequency-wise. Stratospheric, vertigo-inducing rankings.
When you gradually reduced your output, and after I got over being nervous and perplexed and checked the Internet to make sure it was a-okay if you didn't poop for two days and then also called TeleHealth and my mother, I was of course quite pleased. It seemed to me at the time that less frequent pooping meant fewer, shall we say, mishaps. Fewer adventures, fewer emergency clothing changes. Fewer tornadoes of baby wipes and profanity, fewer games of Twister in attempts to keep things unadulterated, fewer contortions of the face remeniscent of The Scream. Less false, shrill giggling and me saying, good poop! vacuously, obviously not meaning it, not meaning it all.
Oh, but I wasn't thinking, and some of our readers more seasoned, more sage, those who have had children are already shaking their heads affectionately, for they know. Perhaps they are thinking of that time when they too were jejune fools, new to baby poop and unwise to the ways of the world. Still brimming with optimism and hope, clinging to that silly, fluttering dream that life will return to something normal. Someday. If only the poop will stop.
It turns out - and of course this is all quite logical in retrospect, and hindsmell is 20/10 Mr. Baby - it turns out that you don't actually want the poop to go on hiatus in anyone's bum. It turns out that human feces, left fermenting for several days, actually just takes on a horrifically fetid odor. One could say that it actually evolves in there. When, after several days of squirming and grunting and turning red and wringing your little hands while I act as your doula, you finally birth this little monster, Mr. Baby, there are no. words. to describe it, there is nothing to compare it to, there is simply not a hyperbole hyperbolic enough to capture the essence of this stench. It's additionally, although not at all unexpectedly, ironic that you began this nasty fermentation process right after we switched to cloth diapers. Thanks for that.
So to summarize my thoughts on this Mr. Baby, if you feel like going back to more frequent evacuations, that would be met with no small amount of joy and fanfare. Please. It's really, really gross. Really.
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