You know, this blog is all about how great it is to have a baby. And, by and large, I agree with that. But, there is a certain part of me that looks back over the blog and thinks, "Man, what about all that turmoil?" Alot has changed in our day to day lives. Of course, duh, you have a baby. And babies need care.
And that’s true. But, I am still amazed at how difficult having a baby makes doing every day things. I would say Claire was two months old before I was comfortable bringing her anywhere. Okay, I’m minimizing. She was probably like four months old. I’d say that’s about how long it took for me to realize she wasn’t so fragile she couldn’t handle the world at large. Point is, even just every day grocery shopping is complicated. I remember once going with Danielle to a Better Buy store. Naturally Claire rode along. She was cranky, so Danielle stayed in the car and I went in to look for the movie we wanted. Five minutes later Danielle comes in with a very happy baby just covered in slimy baby puke.
And that’s another thing. Danielle and I have always like to carve out an occassional block of days to blow through a television season of any series we were interested in as quickly as humanly possible. The expression "clicka clicka" was formed for this process. As in "Click the freakin’ play button already." These days, I’ve got like a hundred hours of television recorded that we can’t barely knock out an hour a go because Claire, even when content, is just so loud. Loud baby make loud noises! The only television we really watch is just the news, which is conveniently broken down into non connected five to seven minute pieces. I couldn’t tell you what is happening on the closing year of Lost, but ask me anything about current events. It works out nice I suppose on account of my enjoying politics.
Even making dinner tonight was rough. Nevermind eating dinner. Danielle offered to chop vegetables while Claire was napping today, because once Claire is up the joint effort that was cooking is now broken into food preparer and baby entertainer. LOUD NOISES! And eating. Do you want to eat first tonight? Oh god. For that one question alone, I welcome the day we can just pretend Claire was misbehaving and send her to her room for the night.
And, I’ll just pass on mentioning the sleep deprived spousal cage match of death that is life with baby. I think I’ve expounded enough on the subject of how enormously inconvenient babies are.
For Claire, in the future looking back: Yes. We openly and publicly acknowledged our deep annoyance with your daily antics. You owe, child. You owe.
Having a baby is awesome. Mostly. To be honest, most days I really don’t feel like it’s any different than any of the other chores one must regularly do to get through life without starving. Meaning, I have yet to have a day where I think to myself what an awesome long term responsibility I’ve naively gotten myself into.
And, for that matter when it does feel more than just a day to day experience it is usually a really cool moment where I’m just so thrilled to be a parent. No foolin’. Like when I went like a month with successfully passing the baby off to Danielle just before Claire puked all over herself and whoever was holding her. Winner!
Oh, that was so awesome. The best was there was no towel around at all and Danielle was all like "quick, get a towel" and I was all like "okay, okay. I’m agoing." And, then, when I got back Danielle was just holding a pool of milky watery baby puke. In retrospect, pointing and laughing is an obviously stupid thing to do to a person holding a cup of baby puke. Obviously. Oh, also, I feel like Ford Prefect: "Don’t forget your towel."
And, while I continue to be not overly fond of babies in general, my baby in specific is awesome. A sadistic dark overlord in training, no doubt. But she’s just so gosh darn cute.
The Dass Chronicle 