As humans we are blessed with poor memory. Sure, poor recall can have negative effects - like when you forget an anniversary and thus have no idea why your spouse just threw a flowerpot at you - but the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages. Some things, if we remembered them clearly, would prevent us from repeating them. Having a baby is just such a thing. Our memories naturally dwell on all the delights of having a baby, and sorta gloss over the bad stuff. It's a good thing, too: if we truly remembered all the travails of raising a baby, no one would do it after the first one. The human population would diminish rapidly, and that would send the world economy in a tailspin when there weren't enough consumers to support the world's cell phone manufacturing industry. As the population plummeted in the western world, infrastructure and emergency services would fail. Mass famine would break out in a generation, followed by riots, the breakdown of national governments, martial law leading to revolution eventually resulting in the collapse of civilization, returning us to roving, feral tribes attempting to scrape a living from the ruins of the past.
So, overall, it's a good thing we don't remember how painful and humbling having a baby can be.
But I find that when we do remember some of the bad stuff, it's softened by the rosy glow of nostalgia, like a survivor of a shipwreck fondly recalling the months spent in a liferaft on the brink of death. So it is with my wife and I, which is why we decided to try to dine out the other night. We got a babysitter to watch Blake, and then proceeded with baby Lucia to go out for an evening together. (note to single folks and those couples without kids: that, right there, is already something extraordinary! Here's a simple formula that few without kids know: the amount of time that you have to stay home and look after the kids, X, while already large with one child, increases exponentially by the number of children, Y. Thus, as there are more kids in a family, the time required soon surpasses the number of hours in a day. This explains why families with more than a few kids vanish from social situations for months at a time: they are actually in a fold of space/time, living a single day of looking after their kids! They emerge for major holidays, blinking in surprise that it's a different season, unsure how much time has passed or what year it is.)
After some discussion, we decided to go to a local French restaurant, Left Bank, because it was close by and had good food that we could both eat. We've eaten there a number of times before and highly recommend it.
So, we arrived in Menlo Park, which is a fancier community and less diverse than the one in which we live (a much higher population of rich white people there) and walked into the restaurant. Now, when we didn't have kids, we would actually get dressed up for a night on the town, with me in a suit and my wife in a dress. At the very least, I would shave and comb my hair.
With a baby, though, I was just happy to be wearing pants. Still, I was a little self-conscious entering the restaurant in shorts and a T-shirt. Well, that wasn't all I had to be conscious of: I also had all the baby gear. Again, for the benefit of those who have not had to take a baby on an outing: bringing up a baby is, in many ways, a logistics exercise akin to packing an expedition to find the source of the Nile. You have to prepare for every eventuality, so you arrive with the collapsible high chair, the packs laden with food, diapers, wet wipes, changes of clothes, a nursing pillow, a nursing blanket, several doses of quinine, a tent, a bedroll, a 10' pole, 12 iron spikes, 50' of rope, flint & tinder, 6 torches, a silver mirror, trade goods to negotiate safe passage from the natives, and a brace of pistols. So, yeah, I felt like I was sticking out a bit. Little did I know what trials were to come, however!
After we were shown to our table, my wife sat down with the baby while I unfolded and set up the chair, then decided to forgo the tent as it was still light outside and I was hungry. The server arrived and proceeded to regale us with an impressive list of specials...unfortunately we couldn't translate his outrageous accent, so we ordered from the menu.
Our baby, Lucia, is on the verge of learning how to walk (like Blake, she is skipping the whole crawling thing as a distraction for suckers; she's holding out for the whole homo erectus shtick), so she's constantly flailing her body around, trying to maintain perpetual motion. So she was strapped into her chair, rocking back and forth. No, it's not a rocking chair - it was a restaurant chair with her baby chair strapped onto it - it's just that, like an 80s metal band, she lives to rock. But, by the time we'd placed our order and were approaching the prospect of an adult conversation, she started to fuss.
Note for those without babies: "fuss" is a genteel code word for "shriek incessantly and with ever growing volume, with the attendant flailing of arms and contorted face usually reserved for victims of dismemberment in a horror film".
When you're a parent of infants, you find a great deal more tolerance for this sort of thing. You have some grace and compassion for people who take babies to the movies, if you even notice the screaming any more. But not so for most people. For the rest of the world, a screaming baby is an abomination requiring death at the stake (or at least a couple of flaming torches and maybe a pitchfork). So one of us had to hold Lucia to calm her down, and this time the duty fell to me. I picked her up, noticing that as she's been gaining weight, the tray of the chair was fitting a bit snug, which may be part of why she was irritated. It's a hard thing for someone like me, who values words and clarity of language, to have to care for a baby, since the baby has no effective way of communicating what's going on behind those eyes. It's either happy or I'm-going-to-explode-if-I-can-get-enough-breath with a baby.
By the time my onion soup arrived, I had her mostly calm again. Whereupon she proceeded to spit up on me.
Note to those who haven't raised a baby: "spit up" is a genteel term for "vomit", "spew", "hurl", "yakk", "throw up", "toss your cookies", "drive the porcelein bus", and/or "technicolor yawn". I dunno why there's this need to soften the blow by coming up with cute terms for things like this...except that, of course, it helps us to forget the gory details so that civilization can continue.
Now, the thing with spit up is that it can be a little...or it can be a lot. There's no telling when the spigot will be turned off so that the flow will cease. Now, I'm not saying that my daughter rivalled Mr. Creosote exactly, but there were parallels. Here we were, in a French restaurant, and while the wait staff wasn't running for cover, people couldn't help but notice the stream of baby vomit pouring out of her, down her front, down my arms, down my chest, and puddling in my lap with every heave. There's probably a basis for a level of a "raising a baby" video game where you have to dodge the spit up in order to reach your objective, but in real life there's not much you can do. In fact, you really have to take the bullet, as a good Secret Service agent would do in defense of the President, blocking the projectile with your body so that it doesn't splatter the restaurant's other patrons or your dinner. My wife was rummaging through our gear, quickly realizing that we'd packed too hurriedly and left our wipes at the last stop (the car). She got up to retrieve them, and so didn't witness the awesome spectacle of the full volume of the baby spew that was still to come. Truly, my daughter had opened a portal in her stomach to the Vomit Dimension, and after untold millennia of confinement, it was eager to escape into our pristine world. In the world of baby-raising, you do tend to get inured to the little vicissitudes of day-to-day life, the squalling, the wailing, the diapers that look like a crime scene of a multiple homicide with power tools. But every once in a while you'll still be aware of the horror...the horror...and when you become aware, it's not a little "oh, this is inconvenient". No, when something happens so monumental to overcome your blase "been there, done that" parent attitude toward these things, it tends to be a big deal. It was one of those moments in life where you realize that everyone is looking at you, and not in an approving way. Sure, you know on some level that there's no fault there, that there's nothing you can do about it, and that it's completely natural. But on a more visceral level, you're back in school on the 4m diving platform with everyone down below jeering because you're taking so long to take the jump. You're back in junior high school asking the girl you've had a secret crush on for years to dance after mustering the nerve to cross the completely empty dance floor, only to have her laugh at you with derision, forcing you to return in the Walk of Shame. Everyone's looking at you. Everyone's laughing at you. At least the restaurant wasn't crowded then. Only a few tables around us were occupied, but they knew. Oh boy, did they know.
Now, the Left Bank, being a pretty nice French restaurant, had set the table quite nicely
with four place settings. So I had four lovely cloth napkins to use to sop the stream. These were quickly saturated with baby throw up (inserting the adjective "baby" here is an attempt on the author's part to lessen the impact on more sensitive readers, by fooling you into thinking that it's somehow less putrid than regular vomit. Rest assured, this is not the case. It's just more liquid, is all), at which point I had to figure out what to do with these dripping napkins. In the end I had to plop them on another chair with a squelch as I had no better place to put them.
Then I just sat there in the funk, holding the steaming baby, watching my soup get cold. I couldn't get up or otherwise move from my chair, for that would have caused a wave of vomit to wash across the floor, spilled from my lap.
Soon the hyper-vigilant maitre'd arrived, unbidden, with an armload of additional napkins, shrugging and saying only "It 'appens" to my mortified look (did I mention it's a great restaurant?). This allowed me to mop up further, and once Lucia stopped the stream, I was able to soak up enough to stop worrying about my skin wrinkling from the moisture. My wife arrived shortly thereafter, replete with wet wipes. With these I was able to wipe off most of the oily film which had collected on my arms, shirt and shorts, and somewhat clean the chair (luckily my clothing and body had absorbed the brunt of the vomit attack, and not much bled through to the furniture) while my wife prepared the baby's change of clothes. Thankfully, as parents we always come prepared with changes of clothes for our kids...unfortunately, I neglected to pack a valise for my own wardrobe. So I was left holding the tidied baby in my filthy clothes while my wife proceeded to eat her dinner, which had arrived at some point during the "baby toxic spill". She quite enjoyed it.
Once she'd finished her repast, I handed our daughter over to her and proceeded to the restroom, somewhat surprised that my footsteps didn't squish more. To get to the restroom in this restaurant, you have to walk all the way across the wide-open dining area, then past the kitchen and through a little staff area where all the servers congregate when they aren't filling orders, then mount a flight of stairs to the nicely apportioned rest room on the second floor. The whole way I was very aware of my surroundings, and tried very hard not to touch anything with my pukey hands or bump into any of the servers so as not to leave a greasy stain. It's a bit like the feeling you have when dealing with a bout of conjunctivitis: you know you can't touch anything if you've touched your face or eyes, because you'll contaminate everything.
Getting into a restroom without using your hands is always a fun challenge.
I proceeded to towel myself off with paper towels from the dispenser, having a flashback to a recent potty training accident with my son at Crate & Barrel. There, too, I found myself using a copious number of towels to clean up a biohazard site. After several minutes of dabbing and wiping, I was satisfied that it was no longer obvious that I had been used as a barf bag. I washed my hands and returned to the dining room, realizing only after I had started that walk across the restaurant that I now had huge wet spots on my clothes. My shirt was made of a light cottony material that hid it well, but my denim shorts had a huge wet spot on them where my lap was (basically, all around the crotch). It no longer looked like my daughter had been sick on me, it just looked like I had lost the title bout with incontinence.
There's a jaunty whistle that you develop in these situations, with a sort of "I'm not at all aware why everyone's staring at me - must be because I'm so good lookin'" insouciant air, that helps somewhat with the embarassment. No one is fooled by it, but it's a little fun to at least act as if you aren't fazed by all the attention.
The other problem, I find, with using a succession of cloth napkins, wet wipes and paper towels to clean up a regurgitation accident: it doesn't do anything about the smell. So I was faced with choking down my fancy dinner amidst the pungent aroma of human stomach acid.
There are some people who are so repulsed by the smell of vomit that they themselves get physically sick. Others gag or at least lose their appetite. Then there are parents. My dinner was, as any parent who has gone through anything similar could tell you, absolutely delicious. After the soup, the marinated skirt steak, the lovely vegetables and a generous serving of fresh pommes frites, I decided that I didn't have room for dessert and so we settled the bill, packed up our camp, shouldered our packs, loaded everything back into the car, and returned home, where I was finally able to change my clothes.
If I didn't write this down here, I realize that I would eventually forget the whole sick aspect of the episode, and merely remember the fine, fine dining. As it is, it's fun to recount the story. It's the wonder of human memory, for the benefit of mankind.
To anyone who was disturbed or dismayed by this account of our travails, and perhaps are having second thoughts about ever having kids, remember this: your parents went through similar things raising you! They just might not remember them so well...
So, overall, it's a good thing we don't remember how painful and humbling having a baby can be.
But I find that when we do remember some of the bad stuff, it's softened by the rosy glow of nostalgia, like a survivor of a shipwreck fondly recalling the months spent in a liferaft on the brink of death. So it is with my wife and I, which is why we decided to try to dine out the other night. We got a babysitter to watch Blake, and then proceeded with baby Lucia to go out for an evening together. (note to single folks and those couples without kids: that, right there, is already something extraordinary! Here's a simple formula that few without kids know: the amount of time that you have to stay home and look after the kids, X, while already large with one child, increases exponentially by the number of children, Y. Thus, as there are more kids in a family, the time required soon surpasses the number of hours in a day. This explains why families with more than a few kids vanish from social situations for months at a time: they are actually in a fold of space/time, living a single day of looking after their kids! They emerge for major holidays, blinking in surprise that it's a different season, unsure how much time has passed or what year it is.)
After some discussion, we decided to go to a local French restaurant, Left Bank, because it was close by and had good food that we could both eat. We've eaten there a number of times before and highly recommend it.
So, we arrived in Menlo Park, which is a fancier community and less diverse than the one in which we live (a much higher population of rich white people there) and walked into the restaurant. Now, when we didn't have kids, we would actually get dressed up for a night on the town, with me in a suit and my wife in a dress. At the very least, I would shave and comb my hair.
With a baby, though, I was just happy to be wearing pants. Still, I was a little self-conscious entering the restaurant in shorts and a T-shirt. Well, that wasn't all I had to be conscious of: I also had all the baby gear. Again, for the benefit of those who have not had to take a baby on an outing: bringing up a baby is, in many ways, a logistics exercise akin to packing an expedition to find the source of the Nile. You have to prepare for every eventuality, so you arrive with the collapsible high chair, the packs laden with food, diapers, wet wipes, changes of clothes, a nursing pillow, a nursing blanket, several doses of quinine, a tent, a bedroll, a 10' pole, 12 iron spikes, 50' of rope, flint & tinder, 6 torches, a silver mirror, trade goods to negotiate safe passage from the natives, and a brace of pistols. So, yeah, I felt like I was sticking out a bit. Little did I know what trials were to come, however!
After we were shown to our table, my wife sat down with the baby while I unfolded and set up the chair, then decided to forgo the tent as it was still light outside and I was hungry. The server arrived and proceeded to regale us with an impressive list of specials...unfortunately we couldn't translate his outrageous accent, so we ordered from the menu.
Our baby, Lucia, is on the verge of learning how to walk (like Blake, she is skipping the whole crawling thing as a distraction for suckers; she's holding out for the whole homo erectus shtick), so she's constantly flailing her body around, trying to maintain perpetual motion. So she was strapped into her chair, rocking back and forth. No, it's not a rocking chair - it was a restaurant chair with her baby chair strapped onto it - it's just that, like an 80s metal band, she lives to rock. But, by the time we'd placed our order and were approaching the prospect of an adult conversation, she started to fuss.
Note for those without babies: "fuss" is a genteel code word for "shriek incessantly and with ever growing volume, with the attendant flailing of arms and contorted face usually reserved for victims of dismemberment in a horror film".
When you're a parent of infants, you find a great deal more tolerance for this sort of thing. You have some grace and compassion for people who take babies to the movies, if you even notice the screaming any more. But not so for most people. For the rest of the world, a screaming baby is an abomination requiring death at the stake (or at least a couple of flaming torches and maybe a pitchfork). So one of us had to hold Lucia to calm her down, and this time the duty fell to me. I picked her up, noticing that as she's been gaining weight, the tray of the chair was fitting a bit snug, which may be part of why she was irritated. It's a hard thing for someone like me, who values words and clarity of language, to have to care for a baby, since the baby has no effective way of communicating what's going on behind those eyes. It's either happy or I'm-going-to-explode-if-I-can-get-enough-breath with a baby.
By the time my onion soup arrived, I had her mostly calm again. Whereupon she proceeded to spit up on me.
Note to those who haven't raised a baby: "spit up" is a genteel term for "vomit", "spew", "hurl", "yakk", "throw up", "toss your cookies", "drive the porcelein bus", and/or "technicolor yawn". I dunno why there's this need to soften the blow by coming up with cute terms for things like this...except that, of course, it helps us to forget the gory details so that civilization can continue.
Now, the thing with spit up is that it can be a little...or it can be a lot. There's no telling when the spigot will be turned off so that the flow will cease. Now, I'm not saying that my daughter rivalled Mr. Creosote exactly, but there were parallels. Here we were, in a French restaurant, and while the wait staff wasn't running for cover, people couldn't help but notice the stream of baby vomit pouring out of her, down her front, down my arms, down my chest, and puddling in my lap with every heave. There's probably a basis for a level of a "raising a baby" video game where you have to dodge the spit up in order to reach your objective, but in real life there's not much you can do. In fact, you really have to take the bullet, as a good Secret Service agent would do in defense of the President, blocking the projectile with your body so that it doesn't splatter the restaurant's other patrons or your dinner. My wife was rummaging through our gear, quickly realizing that we'd packed too hurriedly and left our wipes at the last stop (the car). She got up to retrieve them, and so didn't witness the awesome spectacle of the full volume of the baby spew that was still to come. Truly, my daughter had opened a portal in her stomach to the Vomit Dimension, and after untold millennia of confinement, it was eager to escape into our pristine world. In the world of baby-raising, you do tend to get inured to the little vicissitudes of day-to-day life, the squalling, the wailing, the diapers that look like a crime scene of a multiple homicide with power tools. But every once in a while you'll still be aware of the horror...the horror...and when you become aware, it's not a little "oh, this is inconvenient". No, when something happens so monumental to overcome your blase "been there, done that" parent attitude toward these things, it tends to be a big deal. It was one of those moments in life where you realize that everyone is looking at you, and not in an approving way. Sure, you know on some level that there's no fault there, that there's nothing you can do about it, and that it's completely natural. But on a more visceral level, you're back in school on the 4m diving platform with everyone down below jeering because you're taking so long to take the jump. You're back in junior high school asking the girl you've had a secret crush on for years to dance after mustering the nerve to cross the completely empty dance floor, only to have her laugh at you with derision, forcing you to return in the Walk of Shame. Everyone's looking at you. Everyone's laughing at you. At least the restaurant wasn't crowded then. Only a few tables around us were occupied, but they knew. Oh boy, did they know.
Now, the Left Bank, being a pretty nice French restaurant, had set the table quite nicely
with four place settings. So I had four lovely cloth napkins to use to sop the stream. These were quickly saturated with baby throw up (inserting the adjective "baby" here is an attempt on the author's part to lessen the impact on more sensitive readers, by fooling you into thinking that it's somehow less putrid than regular vomit. Rest assured, this is not the case. It's just more liquid, is all), at which point I had to figure out what to do with these dripping napkins. In the end I had to plop them on another chair with a squelch as I had no better place to put them.
Then I just sat there in the funk, holding the steaming baby, watching my soup get cold. I couldn't get up or otherwise move from my chair, for that would have caused a wave of vomit to wash across the floor, spilled from my lap.
Soon the hyper-vigilant maitre'd arrived, unbidden, with an armload of additional napkins, shrugging and saying only "It 'appens" to my mortified look (did I mention it's a great restaurant?). This allowed me to mop up further, and once Lucia stopped the stream, I was able to soak up enough to stop worrying about my skin wrinkling from the moisture. My wife arrived shortly thereafter, replete with wet wipes. With these I was able to wipe off most of the oily film which had collected on my arms, shirt and shorts, and somewhat clean the chair (luckily my clothing and body had absorbed the brunt of the vomit attack, and not much bled through to the furniture) while my wife prepared the baby's change of clothes. Thankfully, as parents we always come prepared with changes of clothes for our kids...unfortunately, I neglected to pack a valise for my own wardrobe. So I was left holding the tidied baby in my filthy clothes while my wife proceeded to eat her dinner, which had arrived at some point during the "baby toxic spill". She quite enjoyed it.
Once she'd finished her repast, I handed our daughter over to her and proceeded to the restroom, somewhat surprised that my footsteps didn't squish more. To get to the restroom in this restaurant, you have to walk all the way across the wide-open dining area, then past the kitchen and through a little staff area where all the servers congregate when they aren't filling orders, then mount a flight of stairs to the nicely apportioned rest room on the second floor. The whole way I was very aware of my surroundings, and tried very hard not to touch anything with my pukey hands or bump into any of the servers so as not to leave a greasy stain. It's a bit like the feeling you have when dealing with a bout of conjunctivitis: you know you can't touch anything if you've touched your face or eyes, because you'll contaminate everything.
Getting into a restroom without using your hands is always a fun challenge.
I proceeded to towel myself off with paper towels from the dispenser, having a flashback to a recent potty training accident with my son at Crate & Barrel. There, too, I found myself using a copious number of towels to clean up a biohazard site. After several minutes of dabbing and wiping, I was satisfied that it was no longer obvious that I had been used as a barf bag. I washed my hands and returned to the dining room, realizing only after I had started that walk across the restaurant that I now had huge wet spots on my clothes. My shirt was made of a light cottony material that hid it well, but my denim shorts had a huge wet spot on them where my lap was (basically, all around the crotch). It no longer looked like my daughter had been sick on me, it just looked like I had lost the title bout with incontinence.
There's a jaunty whistle that you develop in these situations, with a sort of "I'm not at all aware why everyone's staring at me - must be because I'm so good lookin'" insouciant air, that helps somewhat with the embarassment. No one is fooled by it, but it's a little fun to at least act as if you aren't fazed by all the attention.
The other problem, I find, with using a succession of cloth napkins, wet wipes and paper towels to clean up a regurgitation accident: it doesn't do anything about the smell. So I was faced with choking down my fancy dinner amidst the pungent aroma of human stomach acid.
There are some people who are so repulsed by the smell of vomit that they themselves get physically sick. Others gag or at least lose their appetite. Then there are parents. My dinner was, as any parent who has gone through anything similar could tell you, absolutely delicious. After the soup, the marinated skirt steak, the lovely vegetables and a generous serving of fresh pommes frites, I decided that I didn't have room for dessert and so we settled the bill, packed up our camp, shouldered our packs, loaded everything back into the car, and returned home, where I was finally able to change my clothes.
If I didn't write this down here, I realize that I would eventually forget the whole sick aspect of the episode, and merely remember the fine, fine dining. As it is, it's fun to recount the story. It's the wonder of human memory, for the benefit of mankind.
To anyone who was disturbed or dismayed by this account of our travails, and perhaps are having second thoughts about ever having kids, remember this: your parents went through similar things raising you! They just might not remember them so well...