Here’s one thing about being a new father for which I was not prepared: the inundation of parenting advice we’d be getting from family, friends, neighbors, nurses, lactation consultants, doulas, pediatricians – advice both solicited and not, often conflicting, sometimes with a premonition of a TikTok trend.
The best so far has tended toward the general: Enjoy this time, and trust your instincts. But even with the latter, it’s often hard to tell the difference between instinct and incepted thought.
While at the hospital I started a note on my phone titled, simply, “Baby”. The first entry:
The sounds he makes are exactly the sounds of Gizmo from the movie Gremlins (which, in hindsight, makes perfect sense)
For a couple of months now I’ve been using a CPAP machine for sleep apnea, and the readout from the last thirty days is as good a telling of this story as any:
The gap is when we were in the hospital and I didn’t use the machine. The fractured days after are the negative spaces between diaper changes and feedings. My doctor, half-jokingly, said that it was publishable in a medical journal.
I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining! It’s a good daze. The best daze. The hardest wake-ups are the ones between 2AM and 4AM, but he’s starting to sleep for longer stretches, and Julia and I are getting better at switching off to give the other person a break.
I’ve become significantly better at doing things with only one free hand: adjusting burp cloths, uncapping milk bottles and tubes of Desitin. I get annoyed when an app on my phone isn’t similarly operable. I’m discovering the virtues of Voice Control.
Multiple times a day, I stare at his tiny sleeping body to make sure he’s still breathing
Labor was long. 36 hours. Julia was triaged after slightly abnormal scans at our weekly appointment – she was already past her due date. When her blood pressure came back borderline high, they admitted us that night.
Nicest hospital room I’ve ever been in, luxurious as far as hospital rooms go. Big window with a Yavin-tower view of the Nichols Arboretum. Pull-out loveseat for me. Our care team did what you do to induce labor, broke Julia’s water the next morning. Things moved quick from there – until they didn’t. Dilation slowed, then stopped around 8–9cm (a measure that had negligible meaning before this experience).
By the following morning, it was safer to do a C-section than stay the course. Julia lost a lot of blood in the OR and they had to pump her full of fluids. Baby swallowed some meconium and needed suction and oxygen. But they both bounced back quickly, and a couple days later Julia was back on her swollen, fluid-filled feet.
The medical resident who delivered our son happened to be my brother’s high school girlfriend.
What are the tones and notes of the “new baby” smell? At least a small part of it has to be Dreft
“The biggest challenge of programming is complexity management,” said Marco Arment on the ATP podcast. Marco says it in the context of the ground-up rewrite of his app Overcast, but you can replace programming here with so many other words, like design or beauty. Like growing older.
Listening to a neurosurgeon talk about his father’s stroke on the radio yesterday made me realize that I am now in between generations. My sense of time is eroding beneath my feet. The scope of my life feels, suddenly, both broader and narrower than before.
Let this be the first indexing of his full name to the search bots: Rufus Oscar Hao Cheng, a name that must be spoken with increasing exclamation: Rufus. Oscar. Hao! Cheng!!
Born 8:47AM on July 20, 2024 in the Year of the Dragon.