“Wipe Down With Baby Oil and Bake at 350◦ For 45 Minutes…”
The baby is about three weeks old now, and I want to weigh him. I’m not sure why; it’s just one of those things that I feel like I should know – my telephone number, my social security number, how much my baby weighs – that sort of thing. It’s time for Junior to take his bath and since he’s stripped down and dry anyway, this would be a good time to do it.
I’ve got a pretty good digital kitchen scale. It measures in grams or in pounds and ounces, which makes it perfect for weighing babies, except for one thing – the weighing surface of the scale is only about the size of a salad plate, which makes balancing a squirming baby on it somewhat problematic. Holding the baby with one hand, I fish around in my wife’s Tupperware drawer for the largest plastic dish she has and put that on the scale.
When he was born, people would ask how big our baby was and after some thought, I’d describe him as being “about the size of a meatloaf”, which was pretty accurate at the time. He’s bigger than that now, though – hence the weighing – and after trying to wedge him into it, he doesn’t really fit into the Tupperware very well. I’m sure he would fit better if I could fold him somehow, but I’m pretty sure my wife would frown on that, so I put the dish back in the drawer, then look around for something to weigh him on.
After a moment’s thought, I take the plastic dish back out of the drawer and put it in the dishwasher.
After another moment’s thought, I rummage around in the cabinet where our baking supplies are located and pull out a large cookie sheet. I balance this on the scale, then put a towel on it. I zero out the weight of these, then start the delicate procedure of balancing the baby on top of this whole arrangement.
It is at this moment that my wife walks into the kitchen to find me putting her baby on a cookie sheet.
“What,” she asks in a voice as cold as death, “Are. You. Doing?”
Realizing that explaining the chain of events that has led up to this would be awkward, I try to think outside the box.
“Well,” I tell her, trying to sound extremely reasonable, “you said you didn’t want to do a turkey this year…”
My wife stares me down for an uncomfortable moment, until I feel the need to elaborate.
“I’m not suggesting we eat him for dinner or anything; that would be ridiculous!” My wife relaxes slightly, until I continue – “He’s not that big. He’d be more like an appetizer.”
“You. Are. Not. Funny.” she tells me, then turns around and leaves the room to do some sort of mommy stuff.
I feel like I have performed a service for my wife, because worrying about the baby has become something of a way of life for her and she needs something new to obsess about from time to time to keep the whole thing fun. My favorite of her worries was when she spent an entire sleepless night worried that she couldn’t hear the baby breathing, then was concerned for most of the next day that he was congested and breathing too loudly.
I have to admit that I have been of little help in this regard. Very early one morning, she rolled over in bed, nudged me awake and asked if I could hear the baby.
“No,” I replied. “I’m sure he’s dead.”
I could feel her glare even in the dark, even with my eyes closed.
“Thanks a lot!” she growled. “Now I have to go check!”
In my own defense, she does ask me a lot of odd questions at very late hours, when I’m not at my best.
“Did you put him down?” she’ll ask me as I come back from giving Junior his 2 a.m. bottle.
“Yes,” I’ll assure her.
“In the crib?” she’ll ask.
“No,” I’ll reply as I get climb back into bed. “I gave him $25 and called him a cab.”
As I fall asleep, I vaguely sense my wife get out of bed to make sure he really is in the crib
This is not to say that I don’t like having a son. Now that we males have a two-to-one numerical superiority in the house, a sort of camaraderie has developed between us. We have long conversations – admittedly one-sided conversations, but I kind of like it that way – and we’ve even written a song together.
Because babies are prone to dry skin, our doctor has suggested that we rub Junior down with baby oil every couple of days. Because I tend to be the one to change his diaper before he goes in to nurse with his mother, I’m generally the one to do the oiling. This is the topic of our song. We call it Oiling Da Baby. It is set to the tune of Waltzing Mathilda and goes something like this:
Oiling Da Baby
Oiling da baby…
Oiling da baby…
Won’t you come oiling da baby with me?
So we’ll give you a lube,
Before we put you on the boob…
And we’ll go ooooooiling da bayyyyyy-bee!
We expect to be sued by the people of Australia any day now for defamation of national character.
We also take a lot of walks together. Say what you will about pushing a three-week-old around in a stroller, you will never get lost. Middle-aged women are drawn to you like Shriners to a steakhouse and you can find your way back from anywhere by following the puddles of estrogen they’ve left behind. I cannot, however, believe the sheer amount of crap I need to haul around with me – and this is now, when the baby is pretty portable and user friendly. I’ve been talking to other fathers and apparently, the amount of gear increases exponentially as the he gets older.
On the other hand, a lot of this equipment is making a lot more sense to me than it used to. When you first learn you are having a baby, secret spy satellites pick up on it and report it to the huge crap-for-your-baby industry, who inundates you with baby catalogs. It all seems ridiculous at the time, but now that I’m in the trenches, so to speak, I’m really grateful for our diaper pail that disposes of ugly bags of baby-poo through a complicated set of isolation pistons more appropriate for disposing of nuclear waste. It is the coolest thing ever and I would not trade it for anything (except possibly a full night of sleep), but it does raise an interesting anthropological question:
Imagine a tribe of ancient humans, fleeing across the savannah of Northern Tanzania from a pack of grumpy hyenas. Would they have faced an existential dilemma at such a moment because the electric baby-wipe warmer was broken? My wife and I are both reasonably intelligent, college-educated people and we are at our wits’ end. How did new parents in the past get by without all this stuff? (And no, we don’t actually have an electric baby-wipe warmer, though we are reliable assured that such a thing exists.)
This is a useful train of thought, if only because I can describe to my son the danger he would be placing the entire tribe in if he cried like that in the wild. I describe how the hyenas would probably start with his belly, where the good intestines are, then work their way onto his little fingers and toesies.
Having thus quieted him, I can put him to bed – in his crib – and rejoin my wide-eyed, sleepless wife, who has been eavesdropping on the whole conversation.
(Oh, and in case you were wondering – eight pounds, fourteen ounces.)
