It would have been pretty easy for me to do nothing but write about beer all month long and call it a day, but that would’ve been kind of a cop out as far as dutiful brogging is concerned. Beer is nice, and I’ve been enjoying the fares from Deutschland, but there are still plenty of things on my mind that warrant words, no matter how much I may feel unmotivated to write about them, and when the day is over, it’s more important to me to write out my thoughts than to be lazy, even if it feels kind of forced; this is how seriously I take it to write, sometimes.
Anyway, in this new dad brog, there is one update and there is one observation. As for the update, things have actually been going fairly smoothly since the last time I wrote about my adventures in fatherhood. My daughter and I have a fairly consistent routine that’s been making life not too difficult for either of us for the most part, and the days are flying by like leaves in the winter air. I wake up at 6:30~ish every single day, regardless of if it’s the weekend or not, mythical wife feeds baby, and then I entertain baby until first nap in which I then either really get to work, or if it’s the weekend I nap or sometimes get my jogging out of the way if I’m feeling up for it. Our nanny takes care of kid for the next four hours on weekdays, or I spend time with her on weekends, and then it’s off to bed by 6:30~ish, to which mythical wife and I try to have some time for ourselves. Repeat x infinity
However, as we’ve crossed the nine-month mark, naturally nothing stays the same forever, no matter how comfortable it’s been. And in this particular case, whenever we run into any sort of issue, I can punch it into Google, and the precise query I intended to look up is automatically filled, reminding me that there has been absolutely nothing my kid has done or I have experienced, that millions of parents out there have not already seen.
As indicative in the photo above, that’s my child, standing in her crib. As her little body and brain have been developing, she’s decided that immediate sleep isn’t something she necessarily needs anymore, and has decided to sit up, and pull herself up to her feet and just kind of hangout in her crib, instead of sleeping. 99% of the time, she’ll spit out her pacifier, piss herself off, and begin crying then wailing, then screaming, which prompts me to have to up and try to reset the whole scenario all over again, before she calms down, I walk out, and then she repeats it 3-4 times, burning us out in the process.
It seems evident that she herself is working things out and is playing a daily game of how many shenanigans she wants to pull in her crib between two naps and bed time, and how much she actually wants to sleep, because since behavior has begun, no two sleep sessions have been alike in how much she fights, how much she wanders around independently and how quick or long it takes before she actually goes out, and for parents like me that like routine it’s been occasionally frustrating.
I like to believe that I can operate on a fairly minimal amount of sleep as long as I have coffee to help out, but even I’m feeling like I’m hitting a point of exhaustion that can only really be rectified by some good sleep, but it doesn’t seem like that’s ever going to be available on the horizon anytime soon, which I try to not think about too much, but my body is starting to tell me things I’m feeling, and I’m really hoping it’s just a seasonal thing, since as is often times the case in the south, we have temperature swings of up to 30-40 degrees in the so-called winter.
Now the one thing that is apparent that every single new parent experiences, is that the nails of babies are basically the sharpest things on the planet.
I’ve worked with a lot of materials in my experiences with crafting. Fiberglass shards are pretty vicious things, and I’ve done enough hiking and rock climbing in my life to know the agonizing pain of getting stabbed by particular rocks or even flora out there. I’ve cut myself on glass, and gotten all sorts of splinters, but few things compare to the precise pain that comes from the fingernails of a baby.
Seriously, my daughter’s nails feel like I’m getting super’d by Sabretooth in any one of the Marvel x Capcom fighting games out there, and my health bar is going from 100 to 33 in an instant. During the first few months, it wasn’t that bad, but as her little fingers are developing strength and torque and grip, the nails are really starting to dig in, and she likes to grab the skin right under my neck and has begun leaving marks.
“So why don’t you trim her nails?” one might be wondering; and the thing is, I do. We have a little nail filer tool instead of clippers, because it’s supposedly easier to use, which it was when she was younger and had no defiance, but now she already hates all the things I used to be able to get away with doing, like cleaning her nose and grinding down her nails, so it’s tremendously difficult to file her nails down.
And even when I do, they grow back in like two seconds, and are sharp as they ever were when they do. Like I can get stabbed at 7 am, grind her nails down at 7:15 am, and by the time 3 pm rolls around, those same fingers are digging claws into my neck as if I had never ground them down in the first place. It’s almost as if I inadvertently sharpened them, or put them in a position to grow back more lethal than in the first place.
Like many things I’ve learned with parenting is that I can look things up, but only very rarely are there ever any actual solutions to anything, and most of the times it’s chalked up to “it won’t last forever, endure and hold on.” Apparently parents have been dealing with razor claws in babies since the dawn of time, and short of always keeping them equipped with gloves, which I’m not a fan of because I think it will stunt motor development, the only thing to do is to just deal with it and wait for them to age up to where their nails harden and thicken up some, to where they’re not Sabretooth claws.
