I have played quite a few games at baby showers and heard of many more that I have not had the good fortune to play. What I have come to realize in my first year of motherhood is that all of these games have one thing in common, they were completely designed to put a rose-colored glow on the dirty part of parenting. They are roughly the equivalent of training future soldiers by tossing water balloons for grenade practice or playing paintball to practice face-to-face combat. So I propose that we revise these games to retain the fun while incorporating a hard dose of reality as well as some necessary skill building.
Game #1 - Diapering a stuffed animal. In this game the participants have to diaper a stuffed animal and whoever does it the quickest wins. Once I saw someone diaper a watermelon. I can tell you that diapering a stuffed animal does not compare at all to diapering a child. Even the blindfolded variety does little to help you.
Alternatives:
a. Diaper a cat. I have a cat and I can tell you that he enjoys many things, tuna water, corn chips, baked goods, being scratched under the chin, even broccoli and occasionally being put in a paper bad and swung around in circle but he does not enjoy being diapered. But then again neither do babies. If you try to diaper a cat you face rapid movement and squirming and have to avoid being scratched and/or bitten. This is what it is like to diaper a baby after they learn how to roll.
b. Diaper a rotating sprinkler before it gets back around to you. This is where speed comes in handy. You have about 30 seconds to get the diaper on before the water comes back around and hits you in the face. If you are up for it, and are throwing your shower somewhere you don't have to clean up or ever see the host again, go ahead and fill that sprinkler with pee, or if that's a little too much, just die the water to freak people out a little.
c. Diaper a cat while playing whack-a-mole. The goal of this challenge was inspired when Owen found his penis. Now, I don't care if Owen plays with his penis, pretty much every child will find and be in awe of their genitals at some point and more power to them. In fact, it makes diaper changing a lot easier when Owen does find and enjoy his mini-manhood because it keeps him occupied. (And of course by 'min-manhood' I mean baby-sized, not small. In case this blog comes to light in his teenage years I want to make it clear that Owen is exceptionally well endowed.) But the problem with the penis play is that the penis is often covered in poo when I first take the diaper off and playing with a poo-covered penis is where I draw the line. But it is VERY hard to get in there and wipe before he gets to it. So, hence whack-a-mole. . change a diaper while completing other high speed tasks at the same time, such as wiping the penis down, catching tubes of butt=paste as they sail from the table, trying to get him not to eat the clean diaper before it is on him, or quickly wiping his hand that has just been plunged into the tub of A&D ointment before he plunges that same hand into his mouth. And that is just the beginning.
Game #2 - Trying to identify the taste of baby food blindfolded. Here you taste jars of baby food and try to figure out what's in them. In the first place, baby food is disgusting. What you will realize when you have a baby is most babies will refuse to eat jarred baby food if they ever get the chance to taste something else because 80% of them are inedible. So unless this game is a teaching moment to allow you to empathize with your future bundle of joy, skip it.
Alternatives:
1. Try to feed baby food to a cat strapped in a high chair. Here you will find that most cats also don't like baby food. Even mine who will eat wonder bread off the street won't eat jarred baby food. Cat's also don't like to be in high chairs and yes I know this for a fact.
2. Make recipe combinations that make anything taste like either a pear or a banana. In this game, you try to make foods that are not a pear or a banana blend well with a pear or a banana which seem to be like beer goggles for babies, making food they will not eat, look and taste delicious. To make this challenging include foods like fish, lima beans and brussel sprouts. And if it is truly successful you will be able to feed it to your husband or partner and they will not realize it is baby food. Now Owen eats what we eat and has a quite varied palate but I'm not going to lie, in the beginning the only home cooked food was his so we often ate that.
2. Try to catch finger foods flung off a balcony while eating a sandwich and feeding another sandwich to your friend. For this game you need a partner, or a cat. In this game, you try to eat some food, it does not have to be a sandwich, whatever you are serving at the shower will do, the sandwich is just best for beginners because you can eat it with one hand. With the other, you should try to feed your partner, or a cat if you feel like it. Then someone will start flinging food, good options are: cheerios, blueberries, pieces of cut up chicken, peeled and halved grapes. Your job is to catch as many food items as you can.
Game # 3 - Trying to identify what type of candy bar has been melted into each diaper. Okay, this game is pretty close to being perfect already. It is pretty gross and has you doing things you think you won't actually do, like examine the contents in a diaper trying to identify its origin. But the problem is, it's just not gross enough. There is a big difference between sniffing a melted Reese's Peanut Butter Cup or a Twix and peering at actual poo to try to see if those remnants are peas or corn or cat food. (as an aside, while cats do not necessarily like baby food, babies do like cat food.) You might ask, "Why would you want to know what was in there poo?" There are so many reasons, you are trying to see if they digested in properly, they had a bad reaction and you are not sure what it was so you are trying to figure out, or you are just falling into the examining poo as pride trap that many people do to this day, as if getting out a good poo was something your child should be proud of. I don't really have a game alternative here because it's kind of like that show Dirty Jobs, you might want to watch someone else do something but you don't want to do it unless you have to or you're getting paid for it.
Game #4 - Guess Mommy's Tummy Size - In this one guests try to guess how big mom to be's stomach is. Now in my opinion this is pretty much no fun from the get go because even though I LOVED my baby bump, I can pretty much tell you at 8.5 months I would have hit anyone who guessed that I was three feet around. Also, even if the guest of honor is the 1 in 100 women who is happily immune to feelings of body image towards the end of pregnancy, there's just no real learning here.
Alternative:
a. Guess how many months post-pregnancy this woman is. Here, you show pictures of women post-birth both from vaginal births and c-sections and guests have to try to guess how long it has been since the woman has given birth. Fact is, I left the hospital after my c-section weighing 3 more pounds than I went in, wearing my husbands shoes because my feet were still swollen and my maternity yoga pants and even larger granny underwear to fit over my still enormous belly plus scar.
Okay, I could do lots more like 'try to keep a cat lying down in a crib, try to punch 'gently', how to make a diaper MacGyver style when you have run out, how to play chess while someone screams in your ear, how to walk on a balance beam after you haven't slept for a month, but those all require too many props and preparation. Please enjoy these, and let me know if you try them!
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Monday, February 6, 2012
There Are Starving Kids In Africa - Or My Sophomoric Moment
The fact of the matter is, I work through things better with sarcasm and self-deprecating humor than with sappy introspection and for the most part those posts are a better read. So I apologize in advance for the shear indulgence and perhaps banality of this post but I can still blame it on the hormones for at least another month.
My husband and I have spent a lot of time recently talking about the future, if we want to have more kids, if we are in a financial position to do so, if we can even currently provide for Owen the way we would like to, etc. The only answer where there is a "yes" is the first one, well for me it's a yes, for my husband it's more of a "maybe." The other two are pretty solid nos, or at least for Mitch. I pretty much live in the world of, "hey, it will work out," and he lives in the, "things do not work out unless there is a plan," camp. And sometimes these camps blend nicely, like a well shaken salad dressing and sometimes they don't blend at all.
This week a lot of this came to a head as we heatedly discussed each of our future earnings, a timeline for having another child, Mitch's income goals prior to having another child, my returning to work or not returning to work. For me the discussion has the loud background music of a very loud biological clock sounding much like the tell-tale heart beating under the floor boards from Poe's horror story, louder and louder until it practically drowns out Mitch's words. And on top of all of this, Owen got sick again.
As Owen moved into day two of 102.458 fever, I broke down and took him to the doctor. I know that that seems like a very specific fever but for some odd reason my thermometer is stuck in Celsius and as I am an American I have a pathetic understanding of most measurement systems. Each temperature reading was displayed along side either a frown or a smiley face, tokens to my illiteracy. All of his readings displayed frowns. But there were no ranges of facial expressions like the ones used on doctor's charts to show pain on a range from "everything is okay" to "my genitals have been lit on fire." So, I was not sure if it was a, "Hey, he has a little fever but you might as well go to the grocery story and get a bottle of wine," or an, "Immerse him in an ice bath STAT and call 911 type of fever." So, I ended up doing an internet search after each reading to calculate for me.
But I could tell without knowing an exact temperature that he was not well. His skin burned beneath my fingers, even his hands which are habitually cold and he was listless, clingy and sad. He whined, cried, and clung to me and was generally miserable which made me alternate in waves of sympathy, love, and frustration. The doctor basically said he probably has a virus, keep watching the temperature and let me know in four days.
I went home, bitter about my $30.00 co-pay and not feeling any relief. That night, Owen started screaming in his crib, this high-pitched whine that I had never heard before, and frankly, scared me. We went and got him from his crib and he was burning up. We took him temperature, and after a quick search on my IPad, saw that is was 104.256. We stripped him of his pajamas, and tried to cool him down with a washcloth as he nursed and whimpered. I put him against me skin to skin because I had a vague memory that this helped regulate body temperature though I had no idea if this worked with a fever. When we picked his arm or leg up, they were completely limp. After an hour or so, he felt a little bit cooler. And after another one, we all drifted back to sleep.
In the morning, the fever was back below 101.789 and it continued to drop from there. I know that these sicknesses will be less scary as time goes on but there is something so helpless about the feeling of having your child be sick and not being able to do so much to change it and being a new enough parent that even what you can do, you second guess at each step. Am I stupid to take him to the doctor with a cold? Am I stupid to not take him to the ER with a high fever? Do I warm him up? Cool him down? Use the nasal aspiration? Not use it?
By that weekend he seemed to be recovered and I took a much needed trip to the gym where I planned to work out and take a long steam. I took the book I was reading to the gym and as I pretended to go somewhere read it with the enjoyment of a gourmand who now subsists mainly on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches getting a once a week taste of truffle oil or farmer's market greens. The novel took place in Africa, a fictionalized portrayal of the dubious morals of big Pharmaceutical companies in third world countries. I read the following line, " . . and the women holding babies to sick to cry." And right there, on my elliptical machine, in the middle of my fancy gym, I lost it as tears leaked down my face. As helpless as I felt, I can not imagine what it must be like to be a mother who can not feed your baby, who can not do anything to prevent what probably should be a very preventable death. To not be able to breastfeed because you are starving, and to have no alternatives.
I came home and hugged my husband and told him this. I was thinking about our discussion about potentially not having a second child because we could not afford to give them what we wanted, and of course by this we meant summer camp, piano lessons, trips to Europe, etc. And the fact is, we are so lucky. I am lucky to be able to take Owen to the doctor when he as a 102.347 fever. And if this life is really it, then really we are just so damn lucky. And yes, I know this is very prosaic and pedantic in a way, a sophomoric realization of your order in the order of things but hey, you can not process things as a mother until you are one, or not in the same way, so I guess being sophomoric is okay.
My husband and I have spent a lot of time recently talking about the future, if we want to have more kids, if we are in a financial position to do so, if we can even currently provide for Owen the way we would like to, etc. The only answer where there is a "yes" is the first one, well for me it's a yes, for my husband it's more of a "maybe." The other two are pretty solid nos, or at least for Mitch. I pretty much live in the world of, "hey, it will work out," and he lives in the, "things do not work out unless there is a plan," camp. And sometimes these camps blend nicely, like a well shaken salad dressing and sometimes they don't blend at all.
This week a lot of this came to a head as we heatedly discussed each of our future earnings, a timeline for having another child, Mitch's income goals prior to having another child, my returning to work or not returning to work. For me the discussion has the loud background music of a very loud biological clock sounding much like the tell-tale heart beating under the floor boards from Poe's horror story, louder and louder until it practically drowns out Mitch's words. And on top of all of this, Owen got sick again.
As Owen moved into day two of 102.458 fever, I broke down and took him to the doctor. I know that that seems like a very specific fever but for some odd reason my thermometer is stuck in Celsius and as I am an American I have a pathetic understanding of most measurement systems. Each temperature reading was displayed along side either a frown or a smiley face, tokens to my illiteracy. All of his readings displayed frowns. But there were no ranges of facial expressions like the ones used on doctor's charts to show pain on a range from "everything is okay" to "my genitals have been lit on fire." So, I was not sure if it was a, "Hey, he has a little fever but you might as well go to the grocery story and get a bottle of wine," or an, "Immerse him in an ice bath STAT and call 911 type of fever." So, I ended up doing an internet search after each reading to calculate for me.
But I could tell without knowing an exact temperature that he was not well. His skin burned beneath my fingers, even his hands which are habitually cold and he was listless, clingy and sad. He whined, cried, and clung to me and was generally miserable which made me alternate in waves of sympathy, love, and frustration. The doctor basically said he probably has a virus, keep watching the temperature and let me know in four days.
I went home, bitter about my $30.00 co-pay and not feeling any relief. That night, Owen started screaming in his crib, this high-pitched whine that I had never heard before, and frankly, scared me. We went and got him from his crib and he was burning up. We took him temperature, and after a quick search on my IPad, saw that is was 104.256. We stripped him of his pajamas, and tried to cool him down with a washcloth as he nursed and whimpered. I put him against me skin to skin because I had a vague memory that this helped regulate body temperature though I had no idea if this worked with a fever. When we picked his arm or leg up, they were completely limp. After an hour or so, he felt a little bit cooler. And after another one, we all drifted back to sleep.
In the morning, the fever was back below 101.789 and it continued to drop from there. I know that these sicknesses will be less scary as time goes on but there is something so helpless about the feeling of having your child be sick and not being able to do so much to change it and being a new enough parent that even what you can do, you second guess at each step. Am I stupid to take him to the doctor with a cold? Am I stupid to not take him to the ER with a high fever? Do I warm him up? Cool him down? Use the nasal aspiration? Not use it?
By that weekend he seemed to be recovered and I took a much needed trip to the gym where I planned to work out and take a long steam. I took the book I was reading to the gym and as I pretended to go somewhere read it with the enjoyment of a gourmand who now subsists mainly on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches getting a once a week taste of truffle oil or farmer's market greens. The novel took place in Africa, a fictionalized portrayal of the dubious morals of big Pharmaceutical companies in third world countries. I read the following line, " . . and the women holding babies to sick to cry." And right there, on my elliptical machine, in the middle of my fancy gym, I lost it as tears leaked down my face. As helpless as I felt, I can not imagine what it must be like to be a mother who can not feed your baby, who can not do anything to prevent what probably should be a very preventable death. To not be able to breastfeed because you are starving, and to have no alternatives.
I came home and hugged my husband and told him this. I was thinking about our discussion about potentially not having a second child because we could not afford to give them what we wanted, and of course by this we meant summer camp, piano lessons, trips to Europe, etc. And the fact is, we are so lucky. I am lucky to be able to take Owen to the doctor when he as a 102.347 fever. And if this life is really it, then really we are just so damn lucky. And yes, I know this is very prosaic and pedantic in a way, a sophomoric realization of your order in the order of things but hey, you can not process things as a mother until you are one, or not in the same way, so I guess being sophomoric is okay.
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