How To Wake a Baby

I think it's safe to say that most people know about how difficult it can be to put a child to sleep. The day you become a father, you will hear about nearly every method of infant sleep-aid taught throughout history. Mothers will bombard you with suggestions like, "you need to hold him like this" or "massage the bottom of his feet." Grandparents will tell you to "hum softly to her" or "give her a small shot of bourbon." These are all fine and well, but what you will learn after a few weeks is that your baby will need a carefully customized method that only you and your partner can provide. For example, our baby needs to be walked around the house while being held a certain way, being sung made up verses in the tune of Raffi's "Baby Beluga." It took a while to figure out, but it works. It certainly works a lot more than holding him up to eye level while screaming at him to "shut up! I'm trying to watch 24!" Plus, it saves me money on bourbon.

A musical genius.

But something they don't tell you is how difficult it can be to wake a sleeping baby. "Who would do that" you ask?

Amateur.

You see, feeding a human infant is a delicate and intimate event that allows Mother and Father to provide nourishment to their baby. We stare into their yearning eyes as they feed, gently telling them how much we love them. It is a quiet, sweet, and serene moment that is shared between parent and child.

Which puts them into a seemingly infinite sleep.

Who knew that talking sweetly to your baby while holding him close to your warm body, rubbing his head softly as he rests in the warm crook of your arm, and filling his tummy with warm milk or formula would put your child into a coma? The thing with my baby is, he'll pass out almost immediately, leaving me holding a bottle full of formula in one hand, and a snoring baby in the other who happens to be perfectly content with the fact that it is 4:00am and there is no reason why he should be awake.

Thanks a lot, baby. I will remember these sleepless moments, and I will haunt your adolescence with revenge.

Ahem.

It's times like these when a Daddy will resort to madman creativity in order to persuade his child to wake up and consume his food. Some may call what I do painless torture. I call it unpleasant coercion. Basically, I do the opposite of anything that might lull him to sleep. I tickle him just as he is about to doze off. I make high pitched screeching sounds. I take off his warm clothing. As a bonus, I place cold objects on his tummy. In essence, I am a b-hole to my own son.

Each of these methods is walking a fine line. You want him to wake up, which will most certainly happen for at least a little while. But you don't want him to be in such discomfort that he starts to cry. Because then you are at the beginning of this post again, giving him bourbon. And we all know infants can't have alcohol after 10:00pm.

I don't condone these methods for every infant. Your baby may just need a gentle nudge. If that's the case, good for you. But one thing you should not do is listen to your grandparents when they tell you the best way to wake a sleeping baby is to thump him on the sole of his foot or plug her nose so she can't breathe.

That's just wrong.

As We Grow...

I have spent about four weeks observing my new infant child and I have nearly come to the conclusion that he is not of this world. At first, it was a novel thing to say; he arrived as a shaking blue mass of slimy flesh with reptilian eye slits. He looked, as Bill Cosby once quipped, like a lizard. Everyone knows that they grow out of this appearance, but it's still fun to joke about how your baby is an alien with your mate as she lay destroyed on the birthing bed.

A newborn "human."

Now, I understand why everyone goes on and on about how adorable little babies are. Indeed, a newborn infant is the manifestation of purity and innocence. As parents, we are blessed with the opportunity to witness their growth as each day brings about a new milestone in development. Just the other day, my child greeted me with the biggest smile when I got home from work. The last bit of his umbilical cord recently fell off as a reminder that he is an individual. A few days ago, he managed to poop through his diaper onto his clothing.

Milestones.

But what is it about babies that gives them the distinct quality of being a baby? They look and behave differently than adults. They have strange reflexes that seem to have no use - reflexes that soon fade out. So, at what point, as adults, do we go from being slimy, lizard people to being civilized humans? When do we lose the ability to eat, sleep, poop, and pee at the same time? For that matter, why do we lose that ability? That would be amazing both in its grandeur and its incredible time efficiency.

And why do we have to grow into our adult bodies?

Why?

Perhaps it's due to the fact that infants are constantly folded into odd positions that we cannot see the oddity of their form. They are either being held or swaddled or tossed into an oven. But if you were to straighten one out, or perhaps train it to walk at 4 weeks, you'd notice that its head is nearly 1/3 the size of its whole body. Why is this? When they raise their adorable baby arms, they barely extend beyond their adorable baby heads. What purpose does this serve?

So now I can't decide if it would be creepier if we kept our infantile proportions throughout our lifetime, or if we were all born with adult proportions, only tiny. Either way, I'm having nightmares tonight.