Well, thanks to the warnings of our friend Allison, I was denied the awkwardness of attending breastfeeding class — and subsequently felt like a jerk when only one other husband was absent, and he’s deployed by the military, but I digress — so the What I Learned At Baby School series has been reduced by one chapter.
But we have now successfully completed Baby University, and though we were not required to pass a test or anything, I feel fairly confident we are now capable of keeping our son alive and mostly unharmed, at least until he can walk.
We learned about many things in this latest class, though much of the material was just a re-hash of what we’ve already read or heard and simply confirmed that babies:
1. Are gross (and so are a lot of their parents):
- They’re covered in a cream cheese like substance when they come out.
- They poop A LOT. Like 8-10 times a day.
- The cord stump. Um, yuck. Did NOT know about that.
- Some parents bite their baby’s fingernails.
2. Are loud (especially when you don’t want them to be):
- “Babies are like smoke alarms. It’s hard to know if the house is on fire or if you just burned the toast.”
3. Provide ample opportunity to say, “That’s what she said.”
- “If it falls out, don’t shove it back in there if they don’t want it.”
Again, no big breaking news there, other than the cord stump, but it was nice to get a refresher course and come away feeling like we’re reasonably prepared for the impending chaos.
Probably the most useful part of the class (other than learning infant CPR, which I hope turns out to be totally not useful at all) was the video on “The Happiest Baby On The Block” (see below).
This is a book written by Dr. Harvey Karp, Master of the Dark Arts, who has an allegedly fool-proof method to make crying babies SHUT THE HELL UP. It’s a five-step method, but the part that really stands out as both uncannily effective and unintentionally hilarious is the “shushing.”
As it turns out, shushing VERY LOUDLY into the baby’s ear — as evidenced just before the one-minute mark of the video above — makes the baby stop crying. No, really. It’s like some combination of black magic and hypnotism. And I am most definitely not too proud to try it.
Who new!!! This is no less than a miracle for mothers everywhere!
wow, now I feel like a total jerk. But, seriously, there was only one guy in our class and about 8-9 women. It was weird to have him since he was the only one. Baby Jarrett will never know, and you can always blame me. I just didn’t think that the actual material would be useful to Morgan since he wasn’t going to be whipping out his boob to help, and seriously, it was a total “how to”. sorry.