Decision Tree (HoL 3)

Isaac is one month old today. It has gone by quickly, and at the same time, it also seems that our pre-child lives were long ago. He’s carved out a nice little niche for himself in our organization, and I think he’s an asset to the household. As my sister predicted, the cats do not realize they have been demoted. If the cats are crying for breakfast and Isaac is crying for breakfast, Isaac wins hands down.

Not every aspect of parenthood has been great. Our normal routine goes something like this, around ten, Nancy feeds him and goes to bed. It’s my job to keep him quiet as long as possible. Usually I can go until midnight then he either cries, or I go to sleep.

I had a breakthrough the other day. There are basically four reasons he cries.

1) He’s soiled himself. (His X-men name is going to be Shitstorm.) This is fairly obvious how to fix, and I’ve gotten pretty good at telling from the feel of the diaper if he is wet or not. I had always assumed that diapers were just filled with cotton of some poly-foam material. I think they are actually filled with some absorbent gel material. It probably never biodegrades and is quite possibly made from baby seal flippers or something. We also use the diaper genie, a device which produces what could only be described as a life sized model of an albino anaconda which has just eaten a dozen kittens in a row. My ecologically minded friends, the Williams’s, in Auburn, Alabama can sense the amount of garbage produced every time my child urinates and cry like that Indian in the commercial.

2) He’s bored. Entertainment for a one month old consists of picking the child up and moving him around, or putting something in his mouth. This is pretty straight forward, although he seems to enjoy watching me play “Advance Wars”, and “Age of Empires” on the computer. I’m glad he enjoys war strategy games as long he doesn’t pick up any of that goofy Dungeons and Dragons crap from his “ungodlyfather”.

3) He’s cold. We had a mini breakthrough when we realized he sleeps like….well a baby if we put him in footie pajamas.

4) He’s hungry. This is where the real breakthrough happened. We were so worried that “La Leche League” was going to bust through our windows if we gave him any formula that we held off. One night, it had been about an hour since his last feeding, Nancy was in bed, he was wailing like a banshee, and I was considering which house in the neighborhood would be the best doorstep to leave him on.

Finally I broke down. I didn’t care if he grew a third arm, or developed mad cow disease, I was going to feed him. I made a small amount of formula, and he sucked it down, and then popped the nipple off and licked the sides of the bottle. Then a miraculous thing happened. He turned into the Gerber baby. He fell asleep and didn’t wake up for a few hours. It was a very good thing.

Nancy has been feeling a little confined by the whole breast feeding thing as well. She has to time every trip so we can be home to feed. She occasionally pumps, but it takes forever, and you don’t really get that much. Now that we have loosened the restrictions a little on formula, she’s once again free to leave the house for more than 30 minutes at a time. Breastfeeding in a remote corner of the zoo is one thing, in the middle of Costco is something entirely different.

I spend a lot of time looking at Isaac. In the mornings this weekend, Nancy brings him into the bedroom and he and I look at each other. It’s a great way to start the day. I can’t tell yet what color his eyes are. In different light, they look brown, blue, or even gray. His other neat new trick is his smile. I know it’s not a real smile yet. (He hardly laughed at the movie “The Aristocrats” at all.), but when you do catch a glimpse of a smile, you feel like King Kong on cocaine. It’s a super concentration of all the good feelings about having a child in the first place. It’s good that it only lasts for a fleeting moment at a time, because it’s powerful stuff.

Finally (I know this is a cliché at this point), please find some way to donate to the folks down in New Orleans, Mississippi, and Alabama. I can’t imagine having a small baby and not having food or water or diapers. I can’t imagine not having a cool, quiet place to let them sleep. We all hurt for when our fellow countrymen suffer, but Nancy and I have shed tears whenever we see the anger, frustration, and desperation in the eyes of a parent with small children in the middle of the chaos.

Big Matt