40 Days Old –ish

As the days start running together I thought it would be easy to at least keep track of time by the number of days that my daughter has been on this earth (not in the womb).  Especially after returning to work. 

   But it hasn’t been so easy.  It’s hard to keep track when most of our time is spent trying to appease the child.  It was pretty easy at first, but it seems like every time we figure out a way to quiet her, she decides something else is wrong.  Here is my attempt at a football hold.  This seems to work about 20% of the time for me.

When she is “vaguely dissatisfied” as my wife like to call it, I cycle through the list of things that have been effective.  Playing music, moving her up to my shoulder, walking her around the kitchen and shoving my finger in her mouth to suck on are all effective countermeasures to ease the vague dissatisfaction.  But I never know which method to use at any particular moment so I run through them all.  This is, of course, after the obvious triumvirate of standard baby needs: feed, change and burp.  One of these three is usually the culprit, but after all are tried, we enter into no man’s land of “try anything.”

   One of the most effective and disturbing methods is the computer screen as seen here.

We don’t want to be the parents that plop their kid in front of the television while we go do something else.  We don’t want our daughter to be brainwashed by the “idiot box” or have her intelligence sapped by electromagnetic devices.  Judging by the look on her face, it may be too late already. 

  But darn it, it’s hard not to be an ass when something as simple as a computer monitor can be a distraction for our fussy baby girl.