There are many annoyances in life that you learn to live with: Taxes, the necessary evil; That talentless kid next door who just won’t give up on having career as a professional drummer; Corruption in government; etc. However, there’s one thing that really gets me, over and over, and it’s being nickle-and-dimed.

When the ACA was implemented, it completely screwed anyone who is self-employed, because for no reason at all, it redefined the legal definition of an “employer” to exclude anyone with less than two employees. This meant that, by law, insurance companies had to drop all self-employed from their medical group plans, causing us to need to buy individual plans costing 40-60% more than we had originally been paying. For less coverage. (Side Note: To anyone who’s just started chanting, “Boo Hoo, the rich white guy has to pay a little bit more!” I reply, “Fuck You! The corporations you hate so much had their prices go up 10%, not 50%. Little guys like me are taking the brunt of your incompetent planning, and that money is going nowhere but to the insurance company. It sure as hell ain’t helping the poor, and now, neither can I!”)

This, in and of itself, is an annoyance (just an extra $300+ per month for less coverage), but you learn to live with it. Then, one day, we had a baby. The baby was added to the insurance. As it turns out, however, mommy and daddy’s insurance isn’t good enough for babies under the ACA (despite being in every way comparable to the top ‘metal’ of plans, according to the ACA website) so our family plan has to be *even more* expensive! But hey, it’s only another extra $100 a month over what we would have been paying in the old system (for less coverage – Have I mentioned that we have less benefits, now that care is affordable and we pay more for it?). So, you just swallow it down, and learn to live with it.

But now, we enter the “insult to injury” stage. Yesterday, I got a call from the insurance broker, telling me that the folks who administer the ACA insist that all newborn babies have a dental plan added to their coverage. Stop for a moment, to reflect: Newborn babies need a dental plan. Newborn, won’t-have-even-their-first-temporary-tooth-for-three-to-five-months babies need a dental plan…

I pointed out the absurdity to the broker. She agreed, and told me that the insurance company was aware of it, and had found a loophole in the law that would allow parents to waive the dental option. That sounds great. Let’s do that! Well, hold your horses, Kemo sabe. If you waive the dental option, you have to pay a penalty fee to the government. The clincher? The penalty costs four dollars per month more than the dental coverage!

Have I mentioned that I HATE BEING NICKLE-AND-DIMED?

I swear, every politician who has ever voted for an un-funded mandate should be rounded up and shot. Then, their families should be sent a bill for the cost of the bullets used to shoot them. Then, a month later, their families should get a letter telling them that they have to carry medical coverage for their dead politician for a year, just in case they return from the grave!

Last night, Sabrina and I were asked by a student we used to coach to sit on a panel for her college seminar about midwifery and homebirth. It was an interesting experience, and I wish we’d seen something like it when we first got ‘in the family way’! It was actually attended by a number of expecting parents, which we hadn’t expected, and their questions were similar to ones we’d gone to great lengths to find answers to!

Afterwards, we both agreed that we wished that more of the “right” questions for those expecting parents had been asked, because there was a lot of stuff we wish we’d known beforehand that no one ever tells you about!

So now that we’re “experts”, with a whole month of parenting under our belts, we’ve assembled some thoughts on info a new parent really needs:

1. Review every detail of your birth plan repeatedly with your doctor/midwife – We walked into the birthing center expecting to have a water-birth. The first question from the staff was, “Did you bring your hose?” Our response (not counting my wise-ass remarks about ‘what the kids are calling it these days’) was “What hose?” It turns out that our midwife was supposed to tell us to buy a special hose for filling/draining the birth-pool, but since it was only brought up once, it must have slipped her mind. No water-birth for us!
2. Ask the stupid question – The midwives/doctors/lactation consultants/nurses/etc. may treat you like a dummy for asking if this or that is a problem when it isn’t, but for all their attitude, they miss things. The “hysterical parents” of our child have already caught and corrected two fairly serious problems that all the “professionals” missed!
3. Forget about what to expect – There is a big stack of estimates about what your child will do or want a time x in his/her development. They are all wrong. More accurately, they are all educated guesses and averages. Each one is perhaps correct for 25% of all babies, and there are dozens of them, so there will be dozens that are completely wrong for your child!
4. Breastfeeding makes it so much better – Aside from the convenience and savings of having your own baby-food supplier literally in-house (and believe me, that formula ain’t cheap!), if your baby is consuming only breastmilk, the materials you find filling his/her diaper barely smell, and are no more offensive than creamed peas. Let your baby have formula, and you’ve got a creature that should be banned by the Geneva convention on your hands. If you could find a way to weaponize formula-fed babies, you could rule the world!
5. Growth spurts don’t just happen when you’re 14 – To our surprise, it’s possible for your baby to have as many as two growth spurts a month. When this happens, baby will be crankier than usual for NO DAMNED REASON, and demand feeding as often as every 45 minutes, when awake. It’s also likely that Mommy’s milk production won’t be able to keep up, and you’ll need to supplement with formula. DO pump whenever you can if you aren’t currently at max production, because per the previous observation, you really don’t want to have to supplement with formula!
6. Disposable diaper brand does matter – For the love of all that’s sanitary, do not, and I mean DO NOT, save the five cents per diaper by buying the Walmart store brand! The increased blow-out rate will cost you three times that savings in laundry, cleaning supplies, and sanity! See the previous two points for why this might be…

Yesterday was our first somewhat-long-duration trip as a family. We drove over the Berkshires to an old favorite haunt, the Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory, in Deerfield, MA. At two hours away, this seemed like the perfect test run for going back to living our normal lives with baby!

Since it was a short trip, we didn’t panic, and we didn’t rush, but with our newly-acquired parent-powers, we actually only left the house about a half-hour behind schedule. We patted ourselves on the back and moved out.

Dashiell was unimpressed with our plans, at first. He screamed for over an hour of the two-hour trip out, and would not be consoled, but a quick change of diaper and feeding on arrival cheered him right up, so off we wandered into the hothouse jungle that is Magic Wings.

I’m pretty sure the whole thing was infinitely more interesting to Mom and Dad than to the youngin’, but at least it was peaceful!

As an aside, we were happy to see the water dragons are thriving an MW. We lost Grendel years ago to the power outage during an ice-storm, but he was always our favorite lizard. We like to thing the enormous ones at MW are what he would have turned out like, if he had not been cut down in his youth…

As it turns out, someone was interesting, as well as interested:

All in all, not a bad first family trip!

Also, here’s a random photo that has nothing to do with this post of me showing my son how awkward it is when someone latches onto your finger with their mouth. I’m told it’s too cute not to share:

Should I survive my child’s first year, I know how I’ll make my fortune. I shall bring one or more of the following inventions to market (consider this my patent-pending claim).

1. The Baby Keeper – Think of this as an emergency baby shelf. A flexible sheet of impermeable material is suspended between two rails, and the frame holding those rails is attached to a wall or cabinet. It’s relatively shallow (8-10 inches), and about two feet wide.
    
   When you find yourself in an emergency situation that requires two hands for a moment, rather than needing to run your cub to the nursery and coming back, only to need to go get him again because the instant you put him down, the squalling begins, you simply pop your youngin into the Baby Keeper for a moment. His weight pulls the material snug on either side of him, like a momentary swaddle. He can’t roll or climb out, because the sides are smooth and taught, and he is at the bottom.
    
   One of these should be bolted to the wall of every room in my house (two each in the kitchen and bathroom), the side of both our cars, every restaurant table, the telephone poles along the route where we walk the dogs (often with our child), every aisle in the supermarket, and on every exercise machine known to man. Just take my word for it.

 

2. The Insta-swaddle – This adjustable baby-sleeve is made of hollow, airtight tubes of flexible material connected to a CO2-cartridge-powered inflator. Pop the kid into the sleeve, pull the trigger, and bang, your child is instantly immobilized, just the way he likes it.
    
   It’s perfect for when it’s 4 AM and you don’t have the fine motor skills necessary to wrap and re-wrap your child with intricately knotted cloth (or perhaps your super-human infant was born already smart and strong enough to either untie or pull apart said knots), and as an added bonus, if you accidentally drop your child in a lake, he’ll float!

 

3. The Power Baby – this invention brings green power technology to child-rearing! A small wind turbine and electrical generator** is fitted into a pacifier-like mouthpiece. When your baby won’t be soothed, substitute this for his regular binky, and utilize the incredible power of a cranky infant’s bellowing to charge your cell phone or other small devices. Comes with USB and bayonet output adapters. Let’s face it. You won’t be sleeping anyway, so why not websurf on your tablet for free?
    
   ** Can also be fitted with a hydro-power turbine, if you’ve got a spit-up super-star.

Either Dashiell is a larval superhero, or a lot of supposedly knowledgeable people have no freaking idea what they are talking about when telling us what to expect!  Our less-than-three-week-old, I’m told, can’t really see, can’t hold up his head, can’t turn himself over, and has little control or strength in his muscles.

There’s one small problem, though. All those things are false. Provably false. Our boy can track a finger or other object within about a foot. He can pull his head forward so well that he headbutts both of us almost every day. He can pull his head backward so strongly that he literally lifts his back off the surface he’s on. Not only can he turn over on a flat surface, the little bugger can do it while swaddled sometimes. He’s also strong enough that while I’m holding his feet to change him, he can do an aerial sit up well enough to lift his head off the changing table for a moment or two.

Had we not been told what to expect, none of this would have come as a surprise. As it is, I’m rapidly beginning to worry that my child will be able to lift my truck and shoot lasers out of his eyes by eighteen months…

Thanks for all the great information, medical professionals et al!

It would seem that having a newborn baby mostly means talking about medical issues. You generally decide you don’t have any to deal with, but you still talk about them every time something changes.

Well, yesterday, the constant talks about medical things got a hit! Turns out, Dashiell has “thrush”, which seems to be a fungal infection of the mouth that mostly does nothing but make babies cranky, and their mouths white and patchy. So off to the doctor we went, for the third time in our son’s life.

Yay! Yet another prescription! In the 18 days he’s been alive, and not counting the time we spent in the birthing center, our son has been to the doctor more times than I have in the last year, and I have a stack of medical problems literally longer than your arm (I literally mean ‘literally’, in the literal sense. My medical history outgrew my doctor’s first file folder, so now there are two… I’m a dancer!).

The irony of all this? The medical folks tell us Dashiell is in PERFECT health! He’s gaining an ounce a day, and stronger and more alert than babies are supposed to be for another month.

I think we’re gonna be buying the pediatrician a new car…

I’m at a bit of a loss as to what’s going on in the heads of people who design baby clothes. I’ll be the first to applaud creativity and diversity in available products, mind you, but many of the choices I see here add no aesthetic value I can find, while being wholly impractical and/or completely mad! I can certainly understand where out of pure artistic élan, some closures would have two snaps versus three, or locations would differ from garment to garment, or maybe one would use straps where another used velcro, etc. However, there’s a difference between being creative and making stupid design choices!

Stupid choice #1:
Why does virtually every sleep suit come with a zipper that continues past the crotch and down one leg? It doesn’t make getting that one leg in any easier (in fact, if your baby likes to kick, I’ve discovered, it makes things much harder!), and even if it did, you’d still have to deal with the other leg. As far as I can tell, the sole purposes of this design choice are a) to make getting the thing on a squirmy baby significantly harder and b) to include lots more metal to imprint my baby’s skin when he gets himself twisted up in it!

Stupid Choice #2:
Why are the feet on footie pants and onesies rotated ninety degrees to the outside? are there a lot of babies being born with feet that point straight out away from each other? Have I lived my entire life, never once noticing that the majority of babies are designed to walk like Charlie Chaplin, or a ballet dancer retired after a horrifying over-turn-out incident? On my child, at least, this design means that to get his foot all the way into a leg, you have to push it on as far as it will go, then with one hand pin your child’s limb down while he struggles, with the other hand twist the pant leg 120 degrees inside, and with the third hand, jerk it quickly down over the foot before it can unwind too much.

Stupid Choice #3:
What idiot decided that all baby clothes that open in front should have open necklines? Babies wiggle. They twist. They pull on things. Which of these traits seems compatible with a neckline that easily allows at least one shoulder, and often both, to be squeezed through it? Did the baby-fashion industry get together one afternoon and decide that clearly, the ‘Flashdance’ look was the preferred style for all babies, and that anyone who disagreed was to be shunned by their secret society? I could understand pullover tops with wide necks, but no, those are so snug you have to nearly shear your baby’s ears off to get them on. No, it’s the open-in-front tops, the ones that would be quite easy to put on your child even if the neckline were a fraction of an inch larger circumferentially than your baby’s neck, that allow enough space that every time I turn around, my boy looks like an 80s cheerleader warming up for practice in one of those ridiculous neck-cut-out sweatshirts!

If I as an engineer made design choices this dumb, I’d have been pushed into management decades ago to prevent me from doing further harm!

UNRELATED: Random ridiculously cute baby pic to satisfy popular demand!

This shirt nearly took off my nose and ears, but I look awful cute, don’t I?

We took Dashiell in for his second doctor’s appointment today. It went quite well. His jaundice has diminished to expected levels, and he put on fifteen ounces in the last eight days. We have a healthy baby! Happy is a bit of a different story…

The ‘frenulum’ (of tongue), as it turns out, is the little strip of connective material we all have connecting our tongues to the floor of our mouths. Occasionally, a baby is born with too much frenulum, and it restricts the movement of his/her tongue. This condition is known as being born “tongue-tied”. It isn’t a particular problem, I’m told, except if the mother chooses to breastfeed, in which case it interferes with latching, and can cause mothers pain, and babies not to feed well. When our son was born last week, I noticed that like his mother (who, being adopted, was bottle-fed as a baby), he had an overly-developed frenulum. I pointed this out in the presence of several of the medical staff from the birthing center, and directly to the lactation consultant who works for the center and visits with all new mothers to get them started breastfeeding, if that is their goal. None of the staff reacted to this state as if it were a problem, and the lactation consultant specifically told us “He’s not tongue-tied, so that will make things easier. I was nonplussed, as I couldn’t imagine a way Dashiell’s frenulum could possibly be any bigger, but I gave up pointing it out after this, assuming I was simply being a hysterical father.

Eleven days of absolutely tortuous, often tearful breastfeeding later, I re-broached the subject today with our new pediatrician physician’s assistant. After checking momentarily, she told us, “Wow, he is really tongue-tied!” Five minutes later, she returned with the on-duty doctor, and through an act of Herculean will, I stood in the corner and fiddled with my phone while the monsters assaulted my boy with a pair of scissors! A minute or so later, he was more or less done yelling about the indignity of it all, and tongue-tie free. Mommy reports that subsequent feedings have been an order of magnitude less painful!

What I have learned from this episode:

1. I married a goddamn viking warrior, who was able to put nearly a pound on our boy during a phase in which most babies lose weight by grinding through long hours of intense suffering on nothing but sheer nerve. I love her more than I can put into words.

 

2. I really need to get past this compulsion to hulk-smash anything that makes my son cry.

 

3. My suspicions are confirmed that the vast majority of medical professionals, who pay no attention to what we are saying and make it clear how much more competent they are than us unejikated peasants in such matters, are fucking idiots!

Dashiell has finally finished being born, in both figurative and literal senses!

Last night, his umbilical cord finally detached. Ironically, for once he didn’t seem bothered by change at all, while Mommy and Daddy yelled a lot. Our boy has a belly-button!

In a further milestone, for the first time today, Mommy left Dashiell at home with Daddy and went out for some “me time”. This was a cause for significant worrying to Mommy, but Daddy was ready, and little Dash was unconcerned enough to mostly sleep through the whole thing:

With Mommy significantly recovered, and baby in need of supplies, we finally decided to make our first trip “out” together. Since it was so momentous, we decided to be ‘that family’, the one that every one looks aghast at, with the maximum possible gear and preparation. ‘What the hell,” we figured, “we’re going to Babysaurus,” (meaning Babies ‘R Us, for the uninitiated) “so it’s expected!”

No one was more shocked at the amount of preparations required than Dashiell:

Car-seat, check! Stroller with car-seat adapter, check! Diaper bag, check! Spare change of clothes, just in case, check! Phone numbers for emergencies, check! Dress the baby (oops) check! Wait, it took too long, now we need to feed the baby before we go… Baby fed, check! ooh, remember the feeding coverup… Feeding coverup, check! Hand sanitizer, check! Did you ever walk the dogs? We have dogs? Walk the dogs, check! Wait, the baby’s diaper needs changing. Diaper changed, check! Have we eaten yet today? No time, we’ll have to eat out! Are we ready to take a baby to a restaurant yet? We’ll have to be ready! Loins girded, check!

It took over two hours, but we made it out for our twenty minute trip to the store. Afterward, we had a wonderful meal out, wherein the baby slept the entire time, because we won the lottery and got a car-soother! This kid falls asleep the instant his seat clicks into it’s base, and stays asleep a good hour after the ride is over. Giant sigh of relief…