The first few days

I can think of nothing so pleasant as the first few days/hours in a hospital right after a child is born via C-section. Oh wait, I can think of a thousand things.

Walks along old country roads
Amateur bee keeping
Counting fireflies in the backyard
Digging through trash cans for tea pots
Riding a giant sea horse
And so on...

Here's the strange thing about having a baby, they just give them to you. You get your very own baby whether you've read 9,000 books or not. They just leave the little thing in your hospital room (if you want, but you sort of feel guilty if you don't want to)in what they call a bassinet but what is actually a large plastic container.


As you can see that's definitely just a large plastic container that the hospital staff picked up at a local garage sale on the cheap. It's not exactly the perfect home you'd planned for your baby with matching curtains and Amy Coe bed sheets. No, it's a plastic box that daycares use to store old dirty toys/your newborn baby.

I digress. The main point is that you've got this little bundle of joy sleeping/crying/pooping bits of meconium that are less like your garden variety excrement and more like Elmer's glue. Such that, when you're the only person in the room who can stand up, it becomes your duty to change the baby's diaper despite your status as tyro, and all the while you're trying to remove this dark Elmer's glue from her rear end, holding her legs up, she's screaming at you at the top of her little lungs in a way that can only be interpreted roughly as, "What the hell are you doing? And, if you're going to do it, hurry up already?" (This may all have to do with the author's own insecurity about doing things that involve fine motor skills or that are just new and uncomfortable. He's willing to admit that there may be a whole class of parents out there who loved every moment of wiping up excrement while their baby cooed at them).

Rough sketch of a day at the hospital. We spent four days there.

10 P.M. Commence feeding the baby.
11 P.M. Have a "discussion" (may involve tears) about whether the baby is getting enough food/if the feeding and stuff is going right.
11:30 P.M. Change the baby's diaper. (see above)
11:45 Feed the baby again.
12:34 A.M. Finally soothe the baby enough to close your eyes.
12:45-1:30 A.M. Listen to odd grunts that may or may not be your child ceasing to breathe. Stand over the baby and watch their tiny chest move up and down, feel an overwhelming sense of love and touch her cheek.
1:30-2 A.M. Feed the baby and change diaper. Briefly squeal as s begins pooping out so much meconium that you're almost certain some of is fake.
2:30 A.M Finally settle down to sleep.
2:40 A.M. A nurse comes in to check S's blood.
3 A.M. Sleep.
3:30 A.M. The nurses change shifts and a new one comes in to check S's stats/ruin your life. Smile at her.
4-4:30-Feign sleeping while listening to your daughter make strange noises that might be just regular breathing for an infant.
4:30 Feed the baby. Discuss things like her sucking reflex and whether her hair will stay strawberry blond.
5-6 A.M. Soothe the wife and soothe the baby. Remember to smile at your wife but not the baby who misinterprets your smile as a grimace and thus begins crying. Teach your daughter to imitate you by sticking out her tongue. There she is in her little plastic box playing with her dad. She will be a good girl; you can already tell.
7 A.M. A nurse arrives to check on S's pills. They are good at swaddling the baby. You do not know how to swaddle her. This is your time to feel inadequate. You are good at holding the baby close and humming music to her. The room is a sauna. You've been told that babies get cold rather easily.

At some point during the afternoon or early evening you stand at the window with s in your arms swaying to the music playing on the Ipod. In the distance, telephone wires, brick houses, a steady stream of cars pulsing down Nebraska and leaving the city, a parking lot full of parked cars spitting exhaust, the sky, a pale blue, and a few clouds, like slivers of old bones strewn across a sea floor, and in your arms, a little blue eyed girl drifting off to sleep, and all these small pieces of your reality still too far away for her to perceive, too far away for her to even dream.