Sorry for the lack of a response to the comments of late. My boy caught his first fever, and it’s been no sleep / panic mode at my household for the past week. The fever has subsided, but it made me think of all the new things I learned as a semi-new dad (Dad for five and a half months).
1. Baby boys get morning wood. Just happened to notice it one morning as I was changing my boy’s diaper. On a side note, my diapers are a c to c plus in handling pee, and a f minus handling poop. My boy drinks all breast milk (boob juice as Ted would say), so his poops are pretty watery. When he poops on a diaper I changed, we pretty much have to change his clothes as well. On a side-side note, my wife is considering taking me off diaper duty just as she had taken me off 4 am bottle duty if you recall my last fatherhood related blog entry.
2. Never hold a baby over your face when he has just finished a meal. And if you do, don’t give him/her a wide, open mouthed smile. Trust me.
3. My boy eats his friends. So I have these plastic stick puppets of Ronald McDonald and The Hamburglar that I hang on a couple of key hooks next to my room’s doorway. Every time I pass by it, carrying my son, he would talk to them. (Gibberish). I figured he thought of them as friends, so one day, I took em off the hook and handed them to my son. He talked to them like normal, then proceeded to stick Ronald’s head in his mouth, savoring the taste of his plastic red hair. Well, turns out he tries to taste everything. I see him eyeing his own toes with hunger, he can’t quite reach ‘em with his mouth yet, but one day, they will know the feel of his gums.
4. Shutter speed is crucial for taking pictures of a baby. I’ve probably taken around 600 to 700 digital photos of my son. Only 5% of them manage to be of visible quality. The other 95% end up looking like some blurred mess. I posited the question on my facebook page and got back two words: Shutter Speed. Turns out my camera had a setting for babies. Below are two pics of my kid, before and after I learned of this magical camera setting.
Either all my friends are BS’ing me and are the scum of the earth or I should really stop buying my electronics from the desolate back alley vendor, five blocks from my house. I’m kinda leaning towards the latter there.
Either way, a good picture would look like this:
Only slightly blurry.
5. My status in his eyes seems to drop every month. If I were to create a ESPN style power ranking for this, it would go like this:
1. Mommy ( – - ) Still the King, er, Queen.
2. Milk Bottle (- -) After destroying Semi New Dad in a lopsided battle, it escaped with a narrow victory over Doting Grandma.
3. Doting Grandma (+1) Utterly trounced Semi New Dad with a perfectly executed game plan of “Spoiling”.
4. Semi Doting Grandpa (+1) Doesn’t take much to beat Semi New Dad.
5. Plastic Ronald McDonald Stick Puppet (+1) Tastes better than Semi New Dad.
6. Baby Wipes (+1) Smooth and Refreshing after a poop. Semi New Dad is still just Semi New Dad who improperly changed his diaper, before and possibly after a poop .
7. Baby activity circle (+1) Fun and stimulating. Semi New Dad, apparently neither.
8. Semi New Dad (-5) Rival for Mommy.
6. I’ve become infinitely more approachable in the eyes of women. I remember all the times I hung out with sausages when I was single and in decent shape. Now that I’ve gotten married, have a kid and put on fifty pounds, women actually talk to me. Could it be that overweight married dads = sexy? . . . probably not. Most likely, they see the ring and think “Safe to talk to.” And maybe a ”No hidden agendas” thought as well. But yea, I can totally converse with moms now that I can relate to the parenting experience.
7. This is probably the most tired I have ever been, and my social life has gone down the crapper (yes, even worse than when I was WoW’ing), but it’s been a totally awesome experience so far.
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