Nov 03 2007
You know you’re a new parent when…
- You don’t mind changing diapers. In fact, you start to enjoy it. And if you’re really fired up about the process, you sometimes get competitive with your wife to see how fast you can change a diaper, as if you were a member of a highly tuned NASCAR pit crew.
- In addition to losing our squeamishness about diapers, you discover that you have no problem with jamming your hand in the diaper to be sure that someone made a pee-pee.
- You sometimes find yourself singing or humming extremely annoying children’s tunes and other obnoxious catchy songs for no reason at all when you’re not even near your baby.
- Everything you say to your baby turns into a song.
- You often find yourself marching and singing around your home to “engage,” entertain or lull your child to sleep. (Oddly enough, singing also usually turns into a medley. I find that I can go from a lullaby to a Ragtime standard such as Ragtime Gal to rapping to a Tom Jones song to a sea shanty to “Head, shoulders…” and back to a lullaby without losing a beat. And somehow, with my caffeine high through a sleep-deprived haze, the songs flow seamlessly from one to the next. The beat, the rhythm, the syncopation—it all just works. But who really cares because my son is quietly looking up at me, wide-eyed with rapt attention, and I think I see a smile. And that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?)
- When walking your baby, you have this sad, yearning look when you see other new parents in the neighborhood who are walking their new babies. You know they are stuck in the same new, time-sucking dimension that is all about baby and desperately need someone to commiserate with. Friend? Friend? Friend?
- You quickly learn to pee and do other necessary daily functions with a baby in your arms or in a sling.
- When the day the umbilical cord comes off, it takes on the same excitement as chasing girls with worms on rainy days at the bus stop. (And yes, I did chase my wife with it and grossed her out.) Then you call both sets of grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc. One grandparent even blogged about it.
- Cursing about your baby when it wakes you in the dead of night stops immediately when you see that sad, helpless, little face crying in the crib.
One response so far
Randye can tell you about singing when she was a baby, but I couldn’t belt out a folk song, hold her, and do other necessary bodily functions at the same time while holding the guitar (or banjo in the early days).
And as far a liking diaper changing goes. OK, I can get into the competition aspect, but liking it??? I may have to re-evaluate my opinion of your sanity.