The Daddy Chronicles

The Daddy Chronicles – Part One

Today I start a long term blog project called ‘The Daddy Chronicles’. This will be a regular feature on my blog where I light-heartedly look at the ups and downs of being a new dad. Here is part one…

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Our newborn

Be careful not to break it!

I don’t like hospitals. Just the smell of them makes me feel ill, even if I’m perfectly well. They are the one place that, if you are healthy, you stand a fair chance of leaving sicker than when you walked in. Nevertheless, they serve their function well enough, especially when it comes to babies. While your newborn baby is in hospital, help is no more than the press of a button away.

However, the second you walk through that hospital exit with your baby you’re on your own, your safety net is removed and you have to fend for yourself. So suddenly here you are with this baby and with only the most basic skills & knowledge you must look after it. It’s kinda like being given a formula 1 racing car just after receiving your learner driving license, and then being told the next race begins in 5 minutes. ‘Overwhelming’ can hardly describe it.

But that’s just the beginning. You are already anxious about knowing how to look after your new bundle of joy, and it’s about this time that you are abruptly hit by a whole load of ideas materialising in the back of your head that you had no idea were there. Suddenly all the things that could possibly go wrong and that are out of your control flood into your mind like a tidal wave. Every syndrome, disease and dumb accident that has ever been linked with babies come to life in your brain and make you terrified about what you could accidently inflict on this tiny human.

For me the first thing was Sudden Infant Death Syndrome – not something I’d ever really considered until I stepped out of the hospital with a baby, and then suddenly I couldn’t stop. I was completely paranoid that our baby would suddenly stop breathing, so as a result I would check him every ten minutes and watch him until I could see some clear breathing activity. Then I could relax for 10 minutes until the paranoia came back. If I was really unlucky it wouldn’t even last that long, as I would get worried that I hadn’t actually seen him breathing properly, and go back after 2 minutes. It’s that same feeling that you left the gas on in your house 2 minutes after getting on a train.

Another issue was just picking him up. Apart from the fact his head flopped about like an out of water fish because of the lack of neck control/muscles, I also discovered something that no one tells you – due to the fact that the 3 parts of their skulls take time to meld together after they are born, babies have a big gap between the skull plates. I was terrified that I would accidently put my finger through his head and straight into his brain, like the story of that little Dutch boy plugging a dyke with his finger, only mine would be covered with blood and brain matter.

And then there was bath time; holding this slippy, floppy headed baby with one hand, while trying to manoeuvre him and then wash him with the other. All I could think was that he would slip out of my hand like a bar of soap and accidently drown. What made it worse was our kid hated being put in water, and always gave me this look of terror when I put him in the bath. I took this to mean that at just a few weeks old he had become equally worried about the possibility of me drowning him – already a wise kid.

His bath time face

On top of this you have all the non life-threatening stuff. Because it’s your first kid you have no idea what’s normal and what’s not. Take, for example, baby acne. He leaves hospital with nice clear skin and within a week he has a mountain range of acne volcanoes on his face like a teenager on steroids. You think to yourself ‘Are other babies like this or is it just ours?’ Then you think of every baby picture you’ve ever seen and realise you’ve never seen a single baby with acne – not a good sign. Another good example is the ‘eye thing’ as we ended up calling it. While holding him one day he suddenly goes all cross-eyed. Then does it again at various points throughout the next few days. You look at your wife and ask ‘Are these things a normal part of his development or did we somehow accidently break him?’ So to answer the questions you head to the trusty internet to save the day. Unfortunately, the internet can often make things worse, as a lot of the stuff written on it isn’t actually that ‘trusty’. This leads to a lot of confusion. While one site will say he has ‘nothing-serious-itis’ and all is well, another site will say he’s got ‘super-bad-terrible-condition-itis’ and you should get him to the hospital as fast as your legs can take you. So as parents you just have to search more sites until you find something with authority that will set you straight one way or the other.

But little by little you get used to things and although things haven’t become normal yet we are slowly learning to deal with each new challenge. But I guess this is the way it has to be. Some people say that babies should come with manuals, but I think that’s too complex, and anyway who reads manuals – the baby would probably be a teenager before you finished! But a help button would be nice…

Watch out for part two next month.

Our bundle of joy