'Long time, no blog' or 'Four months of figuring out fatherhood'

So…long time, no blog. As you might imagine, I’ve been kind of busy for the past four months or so with this whole being a parent thing.

And that’s exactly what brought me back to this little corner of the interwebs. I wanted to tell y’all that we’re actually doing it — we’re parents.

I know that sounds ridiculous. Of course we’re parents. We had a kid, right?

But I mean, we’re really parents. Like, I’m pretty sure we more or less know what we’re doing and everything. This wasn’t always the case, and I wasn’t sure it would ever be the case.

It kind of hit home today, when I was clearing out the DVR and watched the months-old episode of The Office in which Jim and Pam had their baby. As absurd as it seemed, the show pretty much captured the emotions — fear, mostly — of those first couple of days. I mean — SPOILER ALERT! — the male lactation consultant and the whole breastfeeding the wrong baby thing were a little over the top, but the overwhelming nature of those early hours of parenthood was underplayed, if anything.

http://www.hulu.com/embed/rvd24YSD-nK-BgQxxTJ9jg

Watching Jim and Pam go through the anxiety of facing all these new challenges that are completely foreign brought memories rushing back. Seeing the nurse roll her eyes at the new parents made me wonder how obnoxious we were during our hospital stay.

We were clueless. We thought we knew it all — we had read the books … well, Megan had read the books … and we had taken all the classes — but we were clueless.

Putting the diaper on that plastic doll didn’t exactly prepare us for the real thing, with the squirming legs and the squirting bodily fluids from one end or the other. And the swaddling? Hell, we couldn’t even do that on the doll, and it didn’t have a fraction of Truman’s escape artist skills.

We convinced ourselves that he didn’t like to be swaddled, so that problem was, um, solved — thank goodness for our pediatrician recommending the aptly-named Miracle Blanket a few days later — and I’d be lying if I said we weren’t thrilled on the occasions the nurse changed a diaper so we could try to peek and pick up a couple hints.

Somewhere between there and here we figured it out. I’m sure we still do some things other parents would scoff at, but I hope we don’t do anything that would cause them to recoil in horror.

We still face our challenges — we’ve recently regressed from sleeping 7-plus hours at night to waking up at least once, for example, which we can only surmise is because Truman outgrew his Miracle Blanket, and we certainly need to be better about getting Truman to partake in tummy time, even though he hates it. (And he really does hate it; not like the swaddling thing.)

And we have a whole new round of challenges coming when we hit the mobility phase. I suspect we will be massive failures in the child-proofing department, at least initially.

But for now, I can honestly say I would give us a passing grade as parents. And that feels pretty damn good.