Baby brain...

Our baby girl has been with us now for nearly three weeks. She has yet to master the whole sleeping a little at night thing, so therefore we’ve been partaking in a bit of extreme parenting – ie surviving on several short 10 minute bursts of sleep nightly and having to pretend to be fully functioning humans during daylight hours.
I had almost forgotten how crazy it was having a newborn around the house – you must realise that it has been a whole two years since we did this last – but we’re relishing fully all the severe sleep deprivation, the constant feeding, the soggy shoulders constantly covered in baby boke, the mountain of nappies, the hours of preparation it takes to actually leave the house, the grumpiness. Honestly we are.
The thing I don’t really relish about this new baby haze phase is the isolation. I don’t keep normal hours, not like other humans. These past few weeks I have become a nocturnal creature, up all night partying with our girl, sleeping till noon, well till 9.30am at least. Being up all night and sleeping all day was much more fun when I was 19.
The postwoman, bills in hand, is my only friend – and she, for some strange reason, is of the thinking that I’m a rather eccentric, scary haired lunatic who tries to strike up conversations about often random and bewildering topics just to talk to another grown up.
“What about that war in Iraq, eh?”
“Yes. The war, indeed. Here are some final demands and courts summons’ for your perusal.”
The husband is my only link with other human life outside my four walls. The poor man is bombarded with questions when he comes home of an evening.
“What news hath you of the outside world?” I demand.
“Nothing exciting,” he says. “I had quite a boring day, actually.”
“Tell me NEWS!” I scream.
“We need petrol in the car,” says he.
“You are joking,” says I. “Petrol? Jeez, Louise! That’s BRILLIANT!
“Yes, yes. Brilliant,” says he, backing away.
And although it sounds like a barrel of laughs, spending the daylight hours wearing night attire isn’t all it’s cracked up to be – particularly when dapper business associates and posh neighbours show up at the front door while you’re kitted out in your terribly unflattering polka dotted pyjamas and vintage MC Hammer t-shirt circa 1985.
Having a newborn about the place is at times terrifying, no matter how many newborns you’ve encountered over the years. They are unpredictable and frankly, loose cannons at times.
I remember shortly after our eldest boy was born we had an incident of baby projectile vomiting. I never knew babies could puke great volumes of liquid vast distances and I’ll not lie to you, readers, I panicked. I called my parents in a state at 5.30am, not long after that I called the emergency doctor, getting the poor man out of bed to speed to our house. I had seen The Exorcist and while I waited for the doc I honestly toyed with the idea of bringing in the parish priest of Finaghy Road North, so that we could rule out demonic possession. In the end the bleary-eyed doctor prescribed more sleep and to go slightly easier on the old irrational panic to this new mother.
And fathers are by no means immune to the horrors which often accompany dealing with a newborn. When the husband was a brand new father he bravely volunteered to mind the boy while I had a bath. Five minutes later the man was practically banging down the bathroom door. I presumed that something awful had happened – like the husband’s hair was on fire, aliens were invading the earth or perhaps the child had combusted – swung open the door just in time to allow the husband access to the loo into which he was violently ill. Apparently changing the child’s dirty nappy had set off a catastrophic chain of vomit-related events.
This time around we know the score, we’ve been down this road before three times already. We’ve been there, done that and have literally got the soggy shouldered, boke backed t-shirts to prove it.