Okay, it’s closer to two months now. The frenzied passage of time is not one of the surprises in being a new parent - that part is very well advertised, and I expect to blink some day soon with her off to college.
What are the big surprises so far?
What helps her sleep
Singing to her is pretty obvious here, as is bouncing her around. But some surprising ones:
Having a hand under her head, versus having her head on a soft pillow
Moving her arms around, such as opening them wide then closing them
Gently restraining her arms and/or legs
This third one is basically just swaddling, which is a well known baby thing. But I never properly knew about it, and also sometimes it helps to just restrain one arm that might otherwise be flailing around.
The arms thing is the most interesting to me - as an adult, moving my arms around would be likely to make me more awake! I guess when you’re still figuring out how to regulate your body as much as babies are, a predictable rhythmic movement of any kind is relaxing. I’ll feel like I’m playing an engaging game with her, and she’ll be enjoying it, and then she’ll just… nod off.
How cute her noises are
This should not have been a surprise. But the sounds she makes are just, incredibly cute. Even the way she cries is often cute! The surprising part I guess is just feeling how powerful and direct an evolutionary circuit can be. In a world with so many superstimuli, where cake tastes better than fruit and playing an RPG feels more productive than working on a project, my own baby is still the cutest thing out there.
How subtle happiness is
All the baby veterans will call a baby “happy” when she’s just sort of… staring off into space, not obviously emoting at all. I guess maybe they’re wrong, or grading on a curve, since being a baby is hard. Or maybe happiness per se is a little too complicated for babies to synthesize yet, and so “absence of distress”/”feeling of comfort” is the nearest approximation. But also, I think there’s a good chance that various matriarchs are just correct, and an alert baby staring at a ceiling fan with her mouth open is, actually, blissful.
How diapers aren’t that bad
Well, early ones. For the first few months, baby poop doesn’t have a strong smell! I feel like this is not advertised nearly enough; you have a long grace period to figure out diapers before they are all that smelly. What a glorious truth!
The tiredness isn’t only from lack of sleep
I’m very lucky. My mother in law has been staying with us for the first couple months of the baby’s life, so we’ve successfully adopted a shift schedule: any of us can take care of the baby during the main daytime hours, then grandma has her in the evening, I have her until somewhere between 1am and 2am, my wife has her in the middle of the night, and grandma takes her again very early in the morning.
The upshot of this is I do get close to a full night’s sleep, pretty often. Yet I am very tired. Having a baby is just intense! You have to care for a being you love very much but can’t communicate very well with, and also to negotiate with various other adults about this big new emotional task. Also your hormones and instincts are firing off in ways that are both new and unusually powerful.
The yearning for time to stop
This is the villain of Xenoblade Chronicles 3, a being who presides over a universe where nothing ever really changes, and time is arrested in a single instant.
For various reasons, I think one of the most obvious interpretations of Xenoblade 3 is about the decision to have children (or otherwise pass the torch), and the competing desire to keep one’s pre-child life indefinitely. Perpetual youth vs. having a legacy for the future.
So imagine my surprise when looking at my baby, I suddenly empathized with wanting time to stop. To take this difficult, stressful, challenging era, where success is often impossible and the poor lovely creature I helped create can be happily staring at a blue light strip (her favorite thing) one second, and yelling in anger or pain for no clear reason the next, and say “please, please, please, can I just stay here a while?”
Then she learns to turn her head back and forth, to look every which way, and whatever, it’s okay. Let’s all grow.