Life is Easy for the Cute

My son is still alive, so apparently letting me take care of him for up to two hours at a time is not as dangerous as his mom thinks. I am not a tiger. I do not eat my young.

Things are going very well. He is ahead on every obsessive-mom metric I can think of except for height, and he has over 20 years to work on that. He is fatter, stronger, and smarter than most kids his age.

We are changing pediatricians, as I have probably written before. The old Nigerian guy we picked has such a thick accent even my wife has no idea what he’s saying. He is completely dismissive of breastfeeding, and he appears to be receiving bribes from formula companies, because somehow free formula mysteriously appears in his office, and he gives it away.

My cousin told me the doctor should be giving us height and weight percentiles at every visit, but he doesn’t. I pushed him to do it, thinking it was a simple thing he knew how to do, but he had to go to his computer and find the same website I would have used.

The last time we went, a well-dressed white lady was at the clerical window having a too-long conversation with the clericals. I thought it was odd that someone with nice clothes and clean shoes–and no children–would be in a pediatrician’s office in Ocala, and I soon learned that my suspicions were well-founded.

That happens more and more as I get old.

She was some kind of industry shill, and she was arranging something with the practice. Maybe she was a formula shill, or maybe she gets paid to put doctors together to make mutual referrals. Maybe she was pushing Ozempic for fat babies. I don’t know, because they never mentioned a product.

I should have gone outside to see which series BMW she drove.

The baby is fine, but there is constant tension between the mom way of doing things and the proper, correct dad way. Mom wants him to lie on his back and have paid servants massage his extremities and feed him milk from a 24-karat bottle. Dad wants him to begin SEAL training.

He has had feeding problems because Mom taught him to sleep in her bed and to breastfeed while covered in multiple layers of clothing. He decided she was a pacifier to help him sleep, so he didn’t make much effort to take anything in. He just lay there snoring with one hand on Mom to make sure she didn’t try to escape. The Mom alarm. The ankle monitor of baby moves.

Last night, I got Mom to talk to a friend of mine who breastfed two kids, and the friend set her straight. She said he needed structure. He needed to be in bed at night, ignored except for necessary feeding and changing. She said the lights needed to be out at night, and the baby needed to be uncomfortable so he would not fall asleep at the nipple. She said to take the romper off so he would be a little cold.

My wife is convinced that our son will die if we expose him to 75-degree air without two or more layers of clothing, but as I have repeatedly told her, crib death is caused by heat, not cold. My friend backed me up, saying her kids sleep best at 69 degrees. It looks like a lot of mothers have killed their children by wrapping them up like little moon astronauts.

I don’t think my wife fully understands that in America and Europe, “room temperature” generally means 68 degrees. Florida has given her a skewed perspective.

He is trying to talk now, although it would be a pretty big stretch to say he has formed words. When he says something that sounds like a word, I repeat it back several times, thinking there might be a chance. And there might. Who knows? It has happened to others. My mother said my sister spoke sentences at 6 months. Strange that I turned out to be so much smarter than she did.

My sister, I mean.

Between my sister and me, it is not a close race.

We have an appointment to have our son’s mouth looked at, to make sure he doesn’t have either of the common deformities that make it hard to latch onto nipples. I’m sure he’s fine. He has opened his mouth plenty wide in the past, and today while he was in a good mood, I pried him open to check, and I couldn’t find any issues.

Once the appointment is behind us, it will probably be clear that we, not a deformity, are the problem.

I should not complain about my wife being overprotective. There are a lot of moms out there sitting in bars while their mothers or strangers look after their kids. Then there was Barack Obama’s mom. Enough said about her.

We have had a number of diaper blowouts. We have used bottles to get more milk into him, and apparently, it works. He has developed a gut.

My wife hated my idea of bathing him in our laundry sink, but when he started having blowouts, I started tossing him in there, because it was the best way to confine the mess and get rid of it. We got him a mesh seat that just fits in the sink. I added a spray nozzle to the faucet. Now my wife loves it and prefers it to the plastic whale-shaped tub she bought him.

I think the tub is no good because it just dilutes the filth without getting rid of it. You put the dirty baby in, the filth sloughs off into the water, and then you dry him off, leaving filth residue all over him. The spray nozzle sends filth down the drain.

We dump him in the seat and go through an elaborate procedure to get his clothing removed and into the washer and his romper removed and into the trash. The poo never touches anything important.

The whole business was my idea. The sink. The spray nozzle. The procedure. Everything. I’m a Southerner. We hate poop.

The baby loves doing it my way. He can’t get enough of the sink. He loves being hosed with warm water.

My wife saw me washing him, and she was amazed that his leg didn’t come off when I grabbed it and used it to lift him so I could spray his back and butt. His expression didn’t change at all. She had been overdoing the gentleness, like parts were in danger of coming loose.

I lift him and blast him right on his Mongolian blue spot. Mom didn’t know these spots existed. Pretty much everyone who isn’t white has them at birth, and on some people they’re permanent. Our son has a big blue area all across his vast rear end. My wife didn’t know Africans had these spots, but of course, they are harder to see on Africans.

I feel pretty smug about the sink. Experience has vindicated my ideas several times, and it’s always sweet.

He has gotten way better at pooping. He used to scream like crazy every time he had to go, but it’s much less tumultuous now. Apparently, he had something called dyschezia. It means you’re pushing hard from above while clamping shut from below. It’s a coordination problem. Now he just growls like a Rottweiler during each push, and everything moves along as it should. It’s like, “GRRRRRRRRRRRR!! GRRRRRRRR!! Ooh! OOOH!”, and then a big smile. He goes through this a number of times during any given poo, so I try to wait until he looks happy. That suggests he has finished and he is ready to hand everything off to me.

Mom thinks he should be changed while he’s still growling or screaming, because she thinks poo stings his rear end. I think that’s wrong, because he has no diaper rash and no broken skin, and he sleeps just fine after pooping without cluing us in.

I just made him wait for a change, and he calmed down. He was grinning and cooing with joy while I fixed him up. I call that another score for Dad.

This week he is falling out of love with the pacifier. His hands are taking its place, which is convenient for us. We don’t have to run for a nice, sanitized pacifier. He can just ram his nasty, filthy fingers in his mouth for long intervals of free amusement that also build up his immune system.

He’s much more fun now that he laughs and smiles and tries to have conversations with us.

I did not have much use for kids before he came along, and I thought babies were gross (which is actually true). I knew some people believed that people who didn’t care for kids shouldn’t have them, but I figured I would love one if he was mine, and of course, that is what happened. No problems at all.

I also worried that I would love my children too much, and that is still a concern. Sooner or later, you have to let them walk outside and face the world by themselves. I have been thinking he will eventually need to go to day care from time to time just to learn how to socialize, and that will be tough for me. Will there be bullies? What about all the sick kids with snot and vomit all over them? Will I be able to trust the attendants?

One thing is for sure. I will never let him spend time in a facility where a man works. It is not normal for a man to want to be around tiny children that belong to other people. I don’t want homosexual pedophiles anywhere around my son. If we ever walk into a place and see a fruit wearing foundation and glitter, we will turn around and walk out.

Pedophilia appears to be much more common in men, and I don’t think that’s because statistics are flawed.

Now that my son reacts to me more, I enjoy interacting with him more. Before everything started to come online, I liked being with him, but after a session got to a certain point, it had more to do with duty than enthusiasm. I wanted his brain to develop. I wanted him to know he was loved. I wanted him to have physical activity so his coordination would progress.

I still haven’t gotten him to shoulder a rifle yet. Give me a month. I am working on it.