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The wife and I are still in “baby jail,” as a close friend has termed it. He and his wife raised 5 children, and somehow, neither of them ran off in the middle of the night and left misleading clues for the police.

We have not left the house simultaneously in several weeks except to see doctors, and I am told I can expect this to continue for several more weeks. Meanwhile, we continue bonding with the baby and working hard to fill his needs and desires. Some would call this love. Others, Stockholm Syndrome.

Some acquaintances claim we keep the baby at home for three months. Due to my wife’s reluctance to drive on safe, well-maintained American roads in a car with about 46 airbags, and her belief that if I am alone with the child for longer than 8 minutes he will die, listening to our friends’ advice would mean I would be visiting Walmart, Target, the dump, and various takeout restaurants alone well into spring.

The up side is that now I don’t have to pay any attention to my wife while shopping. She can give me lists, but I can always come home and say, “Darn. They were out of $10 organic avocados again.”

He outgrew his newborn diapers almost before leaving the hospital, and some of the 3,000 identical onesies my wife bought on Amazon are getting tight, so things are moving right along. Yesterday, I bought his first toys, not counting an electronic elephant a friend bought him. I got him a stuffed cow that has a built-in rattle. I also got him an actual rattle. Finally, I got him a colorful mat that has a built in electronic keyboard. Eventually, he is supposed to kick the keys with his feet in order to drive his parents insane with the same recorded noise we have already heard 9 billion times.

I showed him the cow, and he acted like I was showing him dryer lint. My wife waved it at him–the exact same thing–and he was immediately entranced. Who says delivery isn’t important?

Supposedly, multicolored shapes are about as interesting to him as IMAX is to a fully-formed human being, and we are supposed to dump him on the mat on his belly so he can stare at them and enjoy hours of mental exertion and entertainment. Personally, I think he will just poop on the mat.

I am trying not to get excited about “milestones.” He seems to be on schedule or way ahead on everything, and he is as strong as an ox, but every parent thinks his kid is the next Mozart/Einstein, and then they go on to run forklifts. In the end, we know what he will be: a human being. Not a Marvel character. If he writes his first symphony at 8, fantastic, but being one week ahead of other babies doesn’t prove anything.

My wife kept telling me not to let his head roll backward, and I had to show her that I had nothing to do with it. From the womb, he was able to push his head backward with enough force to lift his body, and he never got tired of doing it, mostly while I was holding him and his mom was hovering nearby in hopes of finding fault.

He has no trouble doing pushups during breastfeeding, and he has punched me in the face at least twice.

Getting him changed can take as long as half an hour, because it’s like trying to put a confirmation dress on a bobcat. Put foot in romper. Put other foot in romper. Put first foot back in romper. Try to catch flailing fist for insertion in sleeve. Insert. Put both feet back in romper. Put arm back in sleeve.

I have finally learned I’m not breaking his arm when I force it into his clothes. He fights back so hard it seems like I’ve hit the limit on his range of movement, but it always turns out he’s just asserting himself.

I have slept about 15 hours since he was born, and my wife has slept even less because she sits awake and stares at him obsessively, as though he were about to pop open and rain prizes on us. I think the last green vegetable I ate was either mold or cole slaw from Sonny’s BBQ, which would have happened early last month. At this point, I’m not completely sure I could pass a dementia screening.

He behaves very well except when he’s full of gas, so that gives us about 16 hours of relatively pleasant interaction during a typical day. His gas is shocking in frequency, duration, and volume. It’s hard to believe it comes from an object that fits in a briefcase. My wife insists it’s not her.

It turns out babies have to learn how to poop. I should know better than to let anything surprise me. I had just assumed God programmed this skill into us. Evidently, they push with the diaphragm while constricting the other end, so they’re like Popeye in the old cartoon where he stood on a ship’s deck and tried to move it by blowing into the sail. One day he will learn to loosen up down below so things can actually escape. As of now, he generally spends about half an hour screaming before anything constructive happens, and between screams, he’s as cheerful as Joe Biden at the beach sniffing a baby dipped in ice cream while depositing a Burisma check in an account in Tortola.

I learned he needs to be placed on his belly to shut him up…I mean help him with the gas. Somehow it helps it move along. It’s kind of astonishing that a person can feel relief when another person toots in his face and passes out, but this is my personal surreality.

I also learned that if you want a baby to hold onto a pacifier, you try to take it away from him. You plug it in and then start yanking on it, and he will suck harder than ever just to spite you.

I don’t know who invented the pacifier, but now that I understand this invention’s value, I can’t believe there are no statues of him.

If only they made them with straps.

Our backward laws, I guess.

My purpose is becoming apparent to me. The ways of fatherhood are working their way from my lower brain to the cerebral cortex. I have realized a lot of my job consists of challenging and annoying him. His mother treats him like a Faberge egg, and I am here to remind him that this life is full of aggravation and disappointment.

She feels she has to pick him up the instant he cries, so now she is kind of a prisoner, wandering around with a thousand-yard stare and a sleeping baby in a sling on her belly. I thought putting an end to that was the whole purpose of giving birth.

When I hear him cry, I make him pass a test. Is he in pain? If no, question 2. Is he hungry? If not, question 3. Is he just screaming again because he can’t figure out how to poop? This is usually the answer.

If it’s 3, I let him scream for a few minutes, because there is no way to stop it, and picking him up will just put his mouth close to my ear so I can be robbed of my remaining high-frequency hearing. I figure he’s going to yell until the job is done, and there is no point in grabbing him and changing him just so he can fill a new diaper two minutes after I put it on. Sometimes rolling him onto his belly helps, but if not, well, life is hard, and a few minutes of squawking will just build up his lungs.

Not that they need it.

I also play with his hands and feet and poke him in the cheeks, subjecting him to strategic dad-annoyance so he will become manly and never wear skinny jeans or become confused as to what sex he is.

Or eat organic avocados. The only organic thing boys should eat is dirt.

The Internet says never to let a baby cry even for a second, because later in life, it may cause him to grow a backbone and secrete testosterone. Whatever. The Internet thinks Rachel Levine is a woman.

I don’t think there is any way to placate a screaming baby while getting stuff together for a diaper change, so I am at peace with my approach. But then I’m the guy who wears electronic shooting muffs while wiping his butt.

As of this writing, my wife is coming around. A little while ago, while he was screeching like a steam whistle for some unknown reason, I found her at the kitchen table, calmly looking at her phone.

As I have said, I am going to try not to write about the boy much on this blog. It is proving hard to resist.