WARNING, WARNING - Baby in the House

We have a new grandbaby in our lives and sometimes in our house. Nana (My wife and no, I don’t call her Nana.) will be providing child care three days a week; so we’ll be seeing her on a regular basis. She already LOVES Nana. Perhaps she will learn to tolerate me. But like with most people in my life, it could go either way.

I have noticed that having a baby has become more difficult since I was in the business. 

Back in the day, it was pretty simple:

• Impregnate your wife.
• Go to the doctor for a pregnancy test.
• Return to the doctor to make sure nature is perking along.
• Contractions – go to the hospital and deliver your baby.
• Take it home.
• Do your best to keep the little booger alive.

Now a couple has much more to do:

• Plan to have a baby.
• Work to get pregnant. (You call this work?)
• Buy a stick at the pharmacy and pee on it.
• If positive, declare the miracle.
• Go to the doctor to receive volumes of information that will assure you that you are incapable of rearing a child and scare the “wadden” out of you.
• Take classes on how to have a baby. (I perceive a trend that each generation is getting dumber. I’m almost positive neither I nor my parents took classes on how to have a baby.)
• Have a party so friends and family feel obligated to join you in spending thousands of dollars on diapers, clothes, and “required” paraphernalia to make sure your little bundle of joy is safe, secure and comfortable.
• Have a sonogram to discover the sex of the baby.
• Have a gender reveal party and make sure it is grander than any that came before – after all, this is a competition. (We did have gender reveal parties for my kids. The doctor came out to the waiting and informed me if it was a girl or a boy. Very exciting. 😃
• Post the sonogram on Facebook.
• When it comes time for delivery, invite the family, close friends, ex-boyfriends and girlfriends, and your Facebook friends into the delivery room to witness this slimy ball of screaming goo squirt out of your body. (I was an EMT for years. Take my word, it isn’t pretty.)
• Take him or her home, sit down among your expensive purchases and PANIC!!

In preparation to be a good parent you have done lots of reading so you know that the experts say, "Your baby will sleep most of the time.". Young couples read things like that and say to each other, "Let's have one of those sleepy little people! We could get our picture taken with it and send it to our friends and family. How much trouble could it be to care for someone that sleeps all the time?"

KABOOM! The new baby arrives and the first thing it is expected to do is cry. If it isn't crying when it arrives, the doctor makes it cry. The nurse says things like, "Crying is good for the baby. It helps her breathe." Aha! The illusion is starting to unravel already. The experts tell you babies sleep. They don't tell you babies HAVE to cry. So there you stand in the delivery room holding a slippery, squalling child. You can tell by the look on your wife's face that there's no way you are putting her back where she came from. You're stuck.

After a short stay in the hospital the staff make you and your wife take the baby home because they're tired of hearing her cry and, after all, it is their hospital. Once the baby arrives home an amazing phenomenon takes place. The tiny child taps into your subconscious and memorizes your sleep patterns and adjusts her own biological clock so that she will be starving at exactly the same moment that you are exhausted. If you were to write the parent/baby schedules, they would look something like this:

 Parent Activity          

• Sleeping (You wish.)                                      
• Taking care of the baby.
• Working
• Taking care of the baby
• Fixing meals
• Taking care of the baby
• Doing laundry
• Taking care of the baby
• Cleaning the house and self and the baby
• Taking care of the baby
• Shopping for food to feed the tribe
• Taking care of the baby
• Running errands
• Taking care of the baby
• Showing off the baby to relatives and friends

Baby activities

• Crying or Filling Diaper
• Sleeping
• Crying and being fed
• Sleeping
• Crying or Filling Diaper
• Sleeping
• Crying and being fed
• Sleeping

There are only two sure-fire ways to put a baby to sleep. First, take her for a ride. That is how I met the police officers in the little town where we lived. After observing me drive up and down the streets of the town in the middle of the night they finally pulled me over and asked me what I was doing.

The second way is showing off the baby to relatives. Uttering the phrase, "Come and see her pretty eyes!" will always put the baby into a deep slumber from which she cannot be revived by any means short of the parents attempting to go to sleep themselves.

Having a crying baby in the house isn't all bad. Until she came along, I had no idea what sort of television programming was available between the hours of two and five a.m.. If it wasn't for the baby helping me tune into infomercials, we'd still be making coleslaw the old fashioned way and I wouldn't have a single psychic friend. Did you know that you can cut your hair using a vacuum cleaner? If you didn't, you should have a baby. From what I can tell, having a baby means not sleeping for the rest of your life.

As the baby gets older, she sleeps better at night but has done enough damage during the day to keep the parents up until sunrise doing repair and clean-up. Eventually, the baby is old enough to drive cars and date other babies. No parent I have talked to has ever been able to sleep while this sort of thing is going on. Saturday morning my mother, who was not a morning person (Understatement) was often more unpleasant than normal. I discovered that the night before dad had awakened her from a sound sleep and said, “Are the kids in yet?” Then he rolled over and went back to sleep. Mother laid awake and steamed. Thus the family suffered through an unpleasant Saturday morning.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not telling you to avoid having babies. Just making sure you understand what it means when someone tells you, "A baby sleeps most of the time." In order for that to happen, you as the parent must sleep none of the time.

Copyright © 2020, William T. McConnell, All Rights Reserved

Bill McConnell is an Interim Minister, a Church Transformation consultant and a Christian Leadership Coach. He is a frequent speaker at Church Transformation events. His latest book on church transformation is DEVELOPING A SIGNIFICANT CHURCH and is available at Westbow Press. He can be contacted @ bill45053@gmail.com. Connect with him on Facebook @ William T. McConnell or on Twitter @billmc45053 or visit his Amazon Author Page @ Amazon author page