Well, Saskia is a week old and can I just say, it's a treat. Really really fun/wonderful/strange/cool experience. I will write more about the actual birth (no personal gory details sorry) later, but I just wanted to toss in a few words about the care of the newborn. Is it hard... Well? No.
For starters they're damn near indestructible. You know how people are afraid they'll leave the car seat on top of the car and drive off? Good news, even if you do, they're fine. Kidding.
However they are fine if they get run over by a
FLIPPING TRAIN!!! (yes, seriously the baby was in that stroller and lived suffering only minor injuries.)
Logistically, they're easy. The eat, sleep, poo parts I knew. The only one that I didn't was "gas". If the first three don't get them to stop crying then burping her seems to be the final trick.
I can really equate the whole thing to the computer in the Hatch on Lost. On the show, they find a weird living quarters where every 108 minutes someone, usually Dreamy Desmond, has to input a sequence of numbers into a computer and hit Enter, thus averting a catastrophe (have we figured out exactly what that was yet btw?). The act of entering the numbers isn't really hard, it's just that you have to consistently do it every 108 minutes no ma. Same with the baby. Caring for her isn't hard, it's just that it takes round the clock attention or she implodes and the sky turns purple. Which brings me to my next point.
Someone asked me this week if she's keeping me up at night. To be honest, no. She doesn't keep me up, she wakes me up at night, but I'm getting decent sleep. Like difficulties people in life like to be melodramatic about, I'm beginning to think that the "No sleep when baby comes" is a self fulfilling prophecy. For the past 10 months I've had people bombarding me with this phrase
"Get lots of sleep now because soon... phoo forget it."
Now from the get go I had issues with this, but swallowed them so I wouldn't look like I was wrong later. For starters, how does one "back-log" sleep? I can sleep for a month, but then one of two nights of no sleep and it's all shot. Secondly, I'm really good on 5-6 hours a night. I know people who tell me they need at the minimum 8, but usually 10. I think they are probably depressed, have mono, or are avoiding life. And finally, when I lived and worked in L.A. I would work 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week, and tried to have a busy (drunk/out late) social life. That meant I would regularly be out until 2 and at work by 7, and that went on for a while. It would be wholly hypocritical of me to say I could hack that, but not a stinkin baby.
Even so, once the lady was nearing the end stage I decided to drink the sleepy Kool-Aid. We would pass out around 10 and wake up about 8:30 or 9. Now, she was carrying a full term baby, I don't know what my excuse was. And it hit me, of course new parents think they don't get a lot of sleep when the baby comes. They just spent the last month oversleeping after everyone told them to, so they have no concept of what a "normal" night of sleep is.
So friends, my very informed (after one whole week!) opinion is this... Before baby arrives, go nuts! Go out with friends, have dinner at 9, stay up until 3 in the morning trying to beat Radec in Killzone 2 (I still haven't), take up smoking if only for a month, hit the gym every day, twice on Sunday, wake up and make breakfast in time to watch the only good hour of the Today Show, do it do it do it (helps instigate labor, this I know.), and just live. Do all these things and the schedule of occasionally getting up to feed or change a baby will seem like a pale imitation of the crazed life you were living.
-GD
