Feel the Burn

If you want to get in shape, skip the gym and just have yourself a kid.  I've only been a dad for 3 months but I'm already in the best shape of my life.  Granted, that's not saying much.  I've never been much of an athlete (unless you count playing Madden, which I do), and have had the build of a high school freshman through my twenties and beyond.  However, the steady baby lifting program that Grace has put me on is having major results.  Now I'm built like a high school sophomore after a growth spurt, albeit one with significantly less hair.

Grace is an awesome personal trainer, determined to push me to my physical limits every single day.  It's a severe approach but it certainly works.  To show you what I mean, here's a typical workout routine.

The Perils of Pure White Noise

I've battled insomnia issues on and off for most of my adult life.  It took becoming a parent to finally discover a cure.  The white noise machine.  It's an unbelievably effective tool for helping me get to sleep.  The constant, soothing sounds of soft rain and babbling brooks put me at ease and shuts my brain down in mere moments.  I relax, my eyes get heavy and before I know it I'm going out.

There's one fairly significant problem with this.  The only time I ever hear the white noise machine is when I'm in Grace's room tending to her when she wakes up in the middle of the night.

Empty Nest Syndrome

I know it's been a while since I've posted, but it's been a crazy couple of weeks, and Carrie and I have been busy readjusting to big changes at home.  Baby Grace is growing up quick and took a huge step, moving out of the bassinet and into her own place.  Of course, her own place is her own room just across the hall, but still, I'm already dreading the day I help her move into a dorm.

Maiming Gracie

We've already covered how I've managed to scar Grace emotionally.  Last week, for the first time, I scarred Grace physically.

Like most daddy screw ups, it started off with me trying to do something good for my daughter, cutting her nails.  In typical baby fashion, Grace constantly grabs at her face, and since baby nails grow like weeds she ends up scratching herself.  Because of this, nail clipping has to happen every two or three days, or else it'll look like we put Grace to bed with a feral cat in her bassinet.

Carrie and I approached nail clipping with extreme trepidation.  Baby nails are adorably, terrifyingly small and Grace is very wiggly, so this endeavor was obviously fraught with danger.  Since I have the steadier hands in the family, I got first crack with the clippers.

The first time I cut Grace's nails was a nerve wracking success.  It took the better part of 20 minutes, but with determined patience and extreme delicacy, my daughter made it through the ordeal unscathed.  And thus, I got to add another permanently ongoing responsibility to my daddy resume.

The weeks went on and I got the hang of things.  20 minutes became 15, then, well, stayed around 15.  Cutting nails is hard.  Nonetheless, I got better at it.  Then I made a fateful mistake.  I got cocky.

Outwardly, I seem like a pretty easygoing, humble guy.  But as anyone that really knows me (or at least played poker with me) will attest, I've got a pretty deep arrogant streak running through me.  It only takes the slightest bit of knowledge for me to turn into an overconfident know-it-all.

So, with a track record of nail cutting success in the books, I started to drop my guard.  The fear of messing up, which had help keep me cautious and precise, had diminished.  I became too quick to clip.  With my sleeping sweetheart lying in my lap, I nicked her thumb.  Grace woke up with a spine chilling scream, torn away from her rest by a never-before-experienced pain.  A trickle of blood dripped from her finger, and I fell to pieces.

One of the toughest things about being a dad is seeing your child in pain and not being able to help them.  It's absolutely heartbreaking.  For example, in the hospital the morning after Grace was born, she sneezed for the first time and started to cry from the surprise.  I was powerless to help her understand what had happened.  It seemed at the time that no amount of comforting would help her understand that sneezes were normal and nothing to be afraid of.  Things like that happen all the time.

This was different though.  This pain was all my fault.  It may seem like a little thing, there'll be plenty more cuts and bruises in the months and years to come, but knowing that the first one was because of something I did killed me inside for the rest of the day.

Carrie did her best to console me, through compassionate teasing, as is our way.  At least during that first night.  The next day, she dropped the compassionate part and was letting me have it pretty good, leaving me with two burdens to bear.

As a postscript, Grace has fully forgiven me, though she got her revenge that night by peeing on me the next time I changed her diaper.  Meanwhile, Carrie received her comeuppance for her reign of joking terror.  Two days after my mis-clipping, Carrie was playing airplane with Grace and things got a bit too turbulent.  Grace threw up from the bumpy flight, leaving my wife as the quivering, puke covered emotional wreck behind our daughter's momentary misery for the rest of the night.

Obsessive Compulsive De-Boogering

I'm sure that this is just the first post of many about how I annoy my daughter.

Like many newborns, Grace's nose is stuffy most of the time.  She can't blow her nose and lays on her back almost all day, so snots tend to build up quickly.  Of course, we only discovered this after Grace was home for a week, which led to a panicked night and a first thing in the morning trip to the doctor, who assured us that everything was fine.  Then, she gave me a fateful instruction: regularly treat the baby with saline drops and keep her nose clear with a nasal aspirator.

And thus, an obsession was born.

Torture instruments of The Boogie Inquisition.

It's become my mission in life to combat the boogers that are infiltrating my beautiful girl's poor nose.  I analyze every noise she makes, interrupt feedings for visual inspections and, to Grace's great chagrin, administer the treatments.

First the drops, a messy endeavor which leaves half of her face soaked as she recoils from the dropper.  Then, worse, the aspirator, a medieval device for poking and prodding the deepest recesses of her sinuses.  What should be a minute of discomfort becomes fifteen minutes of maniacal hunting.  Annoyance registers with my baby and stink eyes are doled out with incredible frequency.

Someone call my hair a therapist.

The worst part is, I know firsthand how it feels to be traumatized by parental obsession.  By own father had a deeply unhealthy need to cut my hair evenly.  Some of my first memories are of sitting on a chair in the bathroom and staying still, impossibly still, for what felt like hours as my dad studied one side of my head then the other only to judge his work imperfect and begin cutting again.  The stress of perfectionism and fear of inevitable scissor nicks still haunts me to this very day.  In fact, I think the reason that my hair is falling out is not genetics but a residual effect of my ordeal.  My hair is actually afraid of reliving this experience and think it would be safer in my shower drain than on my head.

Barber issues aside though, my pops did a great job with my sister and me, the type of job I'm trying my best to do.  But, regardless of my effort and intentions, I'm inevitably going to find ways to break Baby Grace.  If I get enough of the big things right though, this will all turn out okay.