Today was my little girl’s first doctor’s visit. She’s a whopping 7 days old, or in baby years, a fourth of a month, since everybody loves to measure baby age in months.
[I'm going to go on a quick tangent while we're on the subject of baby age. What's the deal with parents who measure their baby's age in months past the one year mark? I swear to God, this one time I heard a woman refer to her son as being 26 months old. You mean he's two?! Look people, past the 12 month mark, measure it in years and half years, rounding either up or down between the intervals. And if they're at 12 months, just say a year. Frankly, I'm sick of doing the division to figure out how old your kid actually is.]
Anyway, today was my little girl’s first doctor’s visit. In the back of my mind I was a little nervous. What if she had a defect or a problem? What if something isn’t developing correctly? What if the doctor looks at my poor, sleep deprived wife and asks, “What the hell have you been doing to this pitiable child?”
I am self admittedly a person who worries about next to nothing. On the afternoon of September 11th, 2001 when everyone was panicking about terrorists, and rushing out to buy guns and gas masks I though, “Hey, my 3:30 Political Science class was canceled, lets go get a pizza.” As we watch our economy fall and unemployment rise around the country today, I’m cool as a cucumber and glad to have the excuse not to buy Christmas presents for all my wife’s relatives who I don’t even know the names of. This little kid rattles that stone cold coolness a bit, and I am not enjoying it so far.
Today, I wasn’t quite so cool. I had that tight knot in the pit of my stomach like you get when your favorite ball team is one score behind at the end of the game, and its make or break time. You’re just dying to know, is my team going to pull through?
We have spent the past week gauging every whimper, dissecting every facial expression and desperately trying to figure out how to simply not kill this kid. We’ve even resorted to guessing what each color of poop means every time we change a diaper. “What’s the yellow poop mean? It’s green this time, is that bad? What if it’s extra runny?” All this effort is in quiet desperation that we’re not unknowingly leading our small, helpless child to peril. After all, she really only has a single mechanism for any ailment: crying.
My baby cries all the time.
Well, the doctor’s visit proved successful and she’s doing just fine. The knot in my stomach is gone and hopefully my wife and I will start to breathe a little easier. But hey, I know none of you care about any of our worries or emotions. You just want to see more baby pictures. So here you go. More pictures of my very alive and healthy little girl.
TIP: Click the image to activate the pop up effect, hover over the left or right of the photo to scroll the the previous or next.
Recent Comments