It’s a Girl

Delphine isn’t exactly talking yet, but she vocalizes plenty, and we like to record her chirps and grumbles. She specializes in the eh-eh, a cute little rhythmic burbling that sounds like the far-off suggestion of a full-fledged wail. Here’s a video of the eh-eh, heading into crying territory.

Apparently, the eh-eh is not original to Delphine. As the New Yorker’s pop-music critic pointed out a few weeks ago, musician The-Dream (yeah, that hyphen’s supposed to be there) uses the eh-eh as his auditory calling card.

Want to hear The-Dream’s slower, mellower version of the eh-eh? It’s in the background at the start of J. Holiday’s R&B ballad “Bed.”

Should you be considering parenthood, there are plenty of classes, books, and how-to DVDs for you. Nervous about labor and delivery? Take a childbirth class. Concerned about maintaining your adult relationships post-baby? Get a self-help book on the topic.

Everybody’s an expert, and everybody’s got an opinion. And none of them match up. We had 18 nurses tending to us over the course of our three days in the hospital, and each had her own take on parenting, breastfeeding, changing diapers, and the like.

The cumulative effect of all this conflicting information is, naturally, overload. It’s hard not to conclude that the maternity world is just like Hollywood: Nobody knows anything.

Including us. We took a childbirth class because, well, aren’t you supposed to? Then, of course, we skipped labor entirely and went straight to the scheduled delivery of a C-section. And we ignored our hospital’s classes on breastfeeding because, well, who needs them? Us, apparently.

We assumed labor and delivery would be hard and breastfeeding would be easy. Instead, it was the other way round.

We shouldn’t have been surprised; after all, neither mom nor baby knows how to breastfeed at the start. But we’ve had to make appointments with six lactation consultants over Delphine’s first month. In addition to those 18 nurses, that means we’ve been given 24 different techniques for breastfeeding — some bad, some good, some so-so. Figuring out which is which has been up to us three.

There’s been a lot of angry online chatter recently over breastfeeding, spurred by a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore and an Atlantic article by Hanna Rosin. (Not to mention the Baader-Meinhof effect of hearing repeatedly about moms caught breastfeeding their babies while driving.) But the articles (and the anger) focused on the context around breastfeeding in contemporary America — the bigger issues of how we think about moms, working moms, child nutrition, and the like — and not breastfeeding itself. Which, it turns out, is dang hard.

Not that labor and delivery isn’t hard, too. But, gee, all those books and classes about pregnancy and childbirth? They kinda didn’t mention the whole breastfeeding thing, which is awkward, uncomfortable, and can be downright painful, producing serious crying jags on the part of both mother and child.

Books about breastfeeding, of course, have the same if-everybody-has-a-different-take-then-who’s-right? problem as getting 24 different “expert” techniques on the matter. Your baby should be lying on her side. No, it’s OK if she’s lying sort of on her back, so long as she’s comfortable. You should use a nipple shield. No, you shouldn’t use a nipple shield. Underwire bras will give you clogged ducts. Underwire bras are just fine. And so forth.

Then there are the consultants who look at how well the baby is gaining weight — Delphine had snacked back up to her birth weight within 10 days of birth and topped 8 pounds in her third week of post-utero life — and basically say, “What’s the problem? Your baby is doing just fine.”

Hm.

Our insurance agents like us. They really like us. They send us birthday cards signed by everybody at the office. And now that we’ve had a baby (and added her to our life-insurance policies, of course), we’ve been upgraded from birthday-card status to baby-blanket status.

The color, font, angle, and sheen of the script on the blanket, however, reminded us of nothing so much as a Vegas billboard.

“One Night Only — Delphine Virginia!”

Maybe she has a future as a showgirl.

The baby-products industry is sort of like the pet-products industry: an endless opportunity for you to waste money on your beloved offspring/animal companion. Pet products, however, have the virtue of being relatively easy to figure out; there are only so many ways, after all, of putting a collar on a dog, rhinestone studs or no. But baby products? Most seem designed by the fiendish demons of parental torture.

Our first challenge was clothing, via the wrap tops supplied by the hospital. Each top was printed with the words “This Side Up” on the front; this seemed cute at first, but after wrestling with the crossover folds and confusing snaps (in strange places like armpits), we decided it was a literally twisted joke. (As you can see from the photo, all three of us are still struggling with these confounded tops at home, in a version that features not just crossover folks and weird snaps but, bizarrely, ribbon ties.)

Next came cloth diapers. When my brother was a baby, you basically flung a diaper around his squirming legs, tried not to stab him with those enormous diaper pins, and wrapped him all up in a plastic diaper cover. Nowadays cloth diapers come in all kinds of fabrics and designs (as do the covers), and you’ve got to master a variety of folds and funky closure devices (such as the Snappi Fastener). It’s mentally overwhelming. And the all-too-dirty little secret of cloth diapering is that we’re still using disposables at night to avoid major messes. Sigh.

Third came the hippie sling, that piece of simple-looking cloth that so many happy parents seem to wear with ease. Not us. There are plenty of options in the sling department, including the Moby Wrap and the Kangaroo Korner. Our version was the popular Maya Wrap, handed down to us by our friends Elaine and Phil. It came with an instructional DVD — a warning sign if there ever was one.

We slung, twisted, looped, and cursed our way through what felt like floppy origami for babies. I racked my visual memory to imitate all those women I’d seen in Guatemala, casually tossing their tots on their backs and wrapping them quickly and efficiently in a piece of cloth. In the end, we managed to sort of get the baby inside the sling and sort of wear it correctly. Next challenge: carrying the baby around the house in the sling without banging her head into the kitchen counters.

Finally, nothing compares to the physical hell of installing an infant car seat. (And that’s not even mentioning the clueless design of the stroller that snaps underneath the car seat, which features cup holders for steaming lattes directly above the baby’s body — the proverbial accident waiting to happen.) Most new parents in the First World are familiar with the excruciating pain of the car seat, which can feel akin to that of an iron maiden. Our seat demanded three separate installation efforts ( Caleb, Caleb and pal Stan, Caleb and my dad) before ACTS Oregon pointed us toward the professional help available at American Medical Response, an ambulance company.

Ninety minutes of belt-tightening and seat-crushing later, Dea the intrepid AMR car-seat expert had explained the generic principles of correct car-seat installation (yes, it’s OK if it flips up from the front several inches) as well as the specific principles of getting our seat to fit in our car (let’s just say that spongy shelfliner and swimming noodles were involved). We left feeling very secure and very much in love with Dea. And she did it all for free. Shocking.

Now if only the word would get out to other parents that yes, there are such things as car-seat-installation experts. It might reduce the numbers of incorrectly installed seats — by some estimates, as high as 82 percent of all car seats.

Like most newborns — or at least like those newborns gracious enough to spare their parents the torment of incessant crying — Delphine sleeps about 22 hours out of the day. But that doesn’t mean she’s just, you know, asleep. No, she grunts and squeaks and snores her way through slumber. And sometimes she goes through an entire oh-wait-maybe-I’m-waking-up-and-am-going-to-cry routine — before falling fully asleep again. These 10 photos, taken over the course of about five seconds, show her faking us out before zonking out again.

On the day I came home from the hospital — the Martha Jefferson hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia — my parents dressed me up in a white dress and blue sweater-and-cap set. (See the very first post on this blog for a look at the same outfit, worn by Delphine on the day she came home from the hospital.) When they got home, my parents put me down in a wooden cradle my father had made for me, cushioned with an afghan my mother’s aunt Zoe had made and a quilt my mother had sewn. (The first and last quilt she ever made, she says.) Then they posed for a photo.

I was one week old; back in the day, as they say, post-C-section babies and their moms stayed in the hospital way longer than they do today. Delphine, Caleb, and I were granted a whopping three full days.

Since we have the same cradle, quilt, and afghan, Caleb and I decided to replicate the photo — minus the groovy 1970s duds my parents were wearing on that March day in 1975. And since Delphine was asleep, we didn’t bother trying to wrestle her back into her coming-home-from the-hospital outfit.

In the 2009 photo, she’s about two weeks old. And yes, she likes snoozing in the cradle just fine.