Conference moira::parenting

760.0. "Dave Barry Articles" by FMAJOR::WALTER () Mon Jun 13 1994 16:08

Thought the Parenting community would like two articles I find hysterical 
from Dave Barry.  Heck, might as well start a note for parenting type Dave
Barry articles.

cj







		DELIVER US FROM THE DELIVERY 
 
					-Dave Barry 
 
Let's take just a quick look at the history of baby-having: For thousands of 
years, only women had babies.  Primitive women would go off into primitive 
huts and groan and wail and sweat while other women hovered around.  The  
primitive men stayed outside doing manly things, such as lifting heavy objects 
and spitting. 
 
When the baby was born, the women would clean it up as best they could and  
show it to the men, who would spit appreciatively and head off to the forest 
to throw sharp sticks at small animals.  If you had suggested to primitive men 
that they should actually watch women have babies, they would have laughed at 
you and probably tortured you for three or four days.  They were real men. 
 
At the beginning of the 20th. century, women started having babies in hospital 
rooms.  Often males were present, but they were professional doctors who  
were paid large sums of money and wore masks.  Normal civilian males continued 
to stay out of the baby-having area: they remained in waiting rooms reading 
old copies of Field and Stream - an activity that is less manly than lifting 
heavy objects, but still reasonably manly. 
 
What I'm getting at is that, for most of history, baby-having was mainly in  
the hands (so to speak) of women.  Many fine people were born under this  
system.  Charles Lindbergh, for example. 
 
Things changed, though, in the 1970s.  The birth rate dropped sharply.  Women 
started going to college and driving bulldozers and carrying briefcases and  
freely using such words as 'debenture'. They just didn't have time to have  
babies.  For a while there, the only people having babies were unwed teenage 
girls who are very fertile and can get pregnant merely by standing downwind 
from teenage boys. 
 
Then, yound professional couples began to realize that their lives were  
missing something - a sense of stability, of companionship, of responsibility 
for another life.  So they got Labrador retrievers.  A little later,they 
started having babies again, mainly because of the tax advantages.  These days 
you can't open your car door without hitting a pregnant woman.  But there's 
a catch: *Women now expect men to watch them have babies*.  This is part of  
the experience of "natural childbirth", which is one of those terms that  
sounds terrific, but that nobody really understands.  An other one is "PH 
Balanced". 
 
At first, natural childbirth was popular only with hippie-type, granola- 
oriented couples who lived in geodesic domes and named their babies things 
like Peace Love World Understanding Harrington-Schwartz.  The males, their 
brains badly coroded by drugs and organic food, wrote smarmy articles about 
what a Meaningful Experience it is to see a New Life Come Into the World. 
None of these articles mentioned the various other fluids and solids that  
come into the world with the New Life, so people got the impression that  
watching somebody have a baby was just a peck of meaningful fun.  At cocktail 
parties, you'd run into natural-childbirth converts who would drone on for  
hours, giving you a contraction-by-contraction account of what went on in the 
delivery room.  They were worse than Moonies, or people who tell you how much 
they bought their houses for in 1973 and how much they're worth today. 
 
Before long, natural childbirth was everywhere, like salad bars, and now, 
perfectly innocent civilian males all over the country are required by federal 
law to watch females have babies.  I recently had to watch my wife have a baby
in Bryn Mawr, Pa.  *Bryn Mawr*, for God's sake. 
 
First, we had to go to 10 evening childbirth classes at Bryn Mawr Hospital. 
Before the classes, the hospital told us, mysteriously, to bring two pillows. 
This was the first humiliation, because no two of our pillowcases match and 
many have beer or cranberry-juice stains.  It may be possible to walk down 
the streets of Kuala Lumpur with stained, unmatched pillowcases and still  
feel dignified, but this is not possible in Bryn Mawr. 
 
Anyway, we showed up for the first class, along with about 15 other couples 
consisting of women who were going to have to have babies and men who were  
going to have to watch them.  They all had matching pillowcases.  In fact,  
some couples had obviously purchased tasteful pillowcases especially for the 
child-birth class; these were the Main Line-type couples, wearing golf and 
tennis apparel, who were planning to have wealthy babies.  They sat together 
through all the classes, and eventually agreed to get together for brunch. 
 
The classes consisted of sitting in a brightly lit room and openly discussing, 
among other things, the uterus.  Now I can remember at time, in high school, 
when I would have *killed* for reliable information on the uterus.  But having 
discussed it at length, having seen actual full-color diagrams, I must say in 
all honesty that although I respect it a great deal as an organ, it has lost 
much of its charm. 
 
Our childbirth-class instructor was very big on the uterus because that's  
where babies generally spend their time before birth.  She also spent some  
time on the ovum, which is near the ovaries.  What happens is the ovum hangs  
around reading novels and eating chocolates until along comes this big crowd 
of spermatozoa, which are tiny, very stupid one-celled organisms.  They're 
looking for the ovum, but most of them wouldn't know it if they fell over it. 
They swim around for days, trying to mate with the pancrease and whatever  
other organs they bump into.  But eventually one stumbles into the ovun, and 
the happy couple parades down the fallopian tubes to the uterus. 
 
In the uterus, the Miracle of Life begins, unless you believe the Miracle  
of Life does not begin there, and if you think I'm going to get into that, 
you're crazy.  Anyway, the ovum starts growing rapidly and dividing into lots 
of little specialized parts, not unlike the federal government.  Within six 
weeks, it has developed all the organs it needs to drool; by 10 weeks, it has 
the ability to cry in restaurants.  In childbirth class, they showed us  
actual pictures of a fetus developing inside a uterus.  They didn't tell us 
how these pictures were taken, but I suspect it involved a great deal of  
drinking. 
 
We saw lots of pictures.  One evening, we saw a movie of a woman we didn't 
even know who was having a baby.  I am serious.  Some woman actually let  
some moviemakers film the whole thing.  In color.  She was from California. 
 
Another time, the instructor announced, in the tone of voice you might use to 
tell people that they had just won free trips to the Bahamas, that we were 
going to see color slides of a Cesarean section.  The first slides showed a 
pregnant woman cheerfully entering the hospital.  The last slides showed her 
cheerfully holding a baby.  The middle slides showed how they got the baby  
out of the cheerful woman, but I can't give you a lot of detail here because 
I had to go out for 15 or 20 drinks of water.  I do remember that at one  
point our instructor cheerfully observed that there was "surprisingly little 
blood, really".  She evidently felt this was a real selling point. 
 
When we weren't looking at pictures or discussing the uterus, we practiced 
breathing.  This is where the pillows came in.  What happens is that when the 
baby gets ready to leave the uterus, the woman goes through a series of what 
the medical community laughingly refers to as "contractions"; if it referred 
to them as "horrible pains that make you wonder why the hell you ever decided 
to get pregnant", people might stop having babies and the medical community 
would have to go into the major-appliance business. 
 
In the old days, under President Eisenhower, doctors avoided the contraction 
problem by giving lots of drugs to women who were having babies.  They'd knock 
them out during the delivery, and the woman would wake up when her kids were 
entering the fourth grade.  But the idea with natural childbirth is to try 
to avoid giving the woman a lot of drugs, so she can share the first, intimate 
moments after birth with the baby and father and obstetricain and the pedia- 
trician and the standby anesthesiologist and several nurses and the person  
who cleans the delivery room. 
 
The key to avoiding drugs, according to the natural-childbirth people, is for  
the woman to breathe deeply.  The theory is that if she breathes deeply, she'll
get all relaxed and won't notice that she's in a hospital delivery room wearing
a truly perverted garment and having a baby. 
 
So, in childbirth classes, we spent a lot of time sprawled on these little 
mats with out pillows while the women pretended to have contractions and the 
men squatted around with stopwatches and pretended to time them.  The Main Line
couples didn't care for this part.  They were not into squatting.  After a  
couple of classes, they started bringing little backgammon sets and playing 
backgammon when they were supposed to be practicing breathing.  I imagine they 
had a rough time in actual childbirth, unless they got the servants to have  
contractions for them. 
 
Anyway, my wife and I traipsed along for months, breathing and timing, re- 
spectively.  We had no problems whatsoever.  We were a terrific team.  We  
had a swell time.  Really. 
 
The actual delivery was slightly more difficult.  I don't want to name names, 
but I held up *my* end.  I had my stopwatch in good working order and I told 
my wife to breathe.  "Don't forget to breathe", I'd say, or "You should  
breathe, you know."  She, on the other hand, was unusually cranky.  For  
example, she didn't want me to use my stopwatch.  Can you imagine?  All that 
practive, all that squatting on the natural-childbirth classroom floor, and  
whe suddenly gets into this big snit about stopwatches.  Also, she almost 
completely lost her sense of humor.  At one point, I made an especailly  
amusing remark, and she tried to hit me.  She usually has an excellent sense 
of humor. 
 
Nonetheless, the baby came out all right, or at least all right for newborn 
babies, which is actually pretty awful unless you're a big fan of slime.  I 
thought I had held up well for the whole thing when the doctor, who up to then 
had behaved like a perfectly rational person, said, "Would you like to see the 
placenta?"  Now, let's face it: That is like asking, "Would you like me to 
pour hot tar into your nostrils?"  Nobody would *like* to see a placenta.  If 
anything, it would be a form of punishment. 
 
But without waiting for an answer, the doctor held up the placenta, not unlike 
the way you might hold up a bowling trophy.  I bet he wouldn't have tried that 
with people who have matching pillowcases. 
 
The placenta aside, everything worked out fine. We ended up with an extremely 
healthy, organic, natural baby, who immediately demanded to be put back into  
the uterus. 
 
All in all, I'd say it's not a bad way to reproduce, although I understand 
that some members of the flatworm family simply divide into two.





BRINGING UP BABIES 
 
  -- Dave Barry 
 
The main thing you should know about raising extremely young babies is that, 
physically, they are not at all like you. 
 
If you were to open up a baby--and I am not for a moment suggesting that you 
should--you would find that 87 percent of the space normally reserved for 
bodily organs is taken up by huge, highly active drool glands.  Famous child 
psychologists like to go around claiming that, even at a very early age, 
babies are learning about spatial relationships, etc., but the truth is that 
for the first two or three months all they do is drool. 
 
Oh, I'm not saying babies don't have moods.  They have three of them: 
 
Mood One:  Just about to cry. 
Mood Two:  Crying. 
Mood Three:  Just finished crying. 
 
Your job, as parent, is to keep the baby in Mood Three as much as possible. 
This means you have to figure out why it's crying.  Here's a tip:  Babies 
never cry because their diapers are full.  You change their diapers only to 
make yourself feel better.  You could leave the same diaper on a baby for 
months, and the baby would be perfectly happy, although considerably heavier 
and less pleasant to be around. 
 
So that leaves only two reasons why your baby cries: 
 
1.  It is hungry. 
2.  Some other reason. 
 
If your baby is hungry, you should feed it. 
 
You can either bottle-feed or breast-feed your baby.  Many noted health 
fanatics recommend breast-feeding on the grounds that it is good for the 
baby.  This may be true, but for fathers the real advantage is that only 
women can do it.  This means fathers don't have to get up at the insane 
hours babies like to get up. 
 
At first you may feel guilty, and you'll get up in the middle of the night 
to give your wife moral support.  But after a while you learn how to do 
so without waking up.  In the morning, when she's exhausted, you can  
commiserate with her.  You can say, "I know how you feel.  This morally 
supporting is no bed of roses, either."  She'll appreciate this. 
 
If your baby doesn't stop crying after you feed it, you should hand it 
back and forth and say, "I wonder what could be wrong?"  This does 
no good whatsoever, but it passes the time.  You can also try making funny 
faces and playing funny baby games.  Here are three that I found particularly 
effective: 
 
 o Oklahoma Baby Chicken Hat:  Grasp your baby and put it on your head  
   like a hat, stomach down; then stride around the room and cluck like 
   a chicken in time to "Surry With The Fringe on Top", bouncing in time 
   to the music. 
 
 o Wild Teenage Babies From Outer Space:  Lie on your back and hold your 
   baby over you, facing down.  Move it slowly up and down, like a flying 
   saucer, making flying-saucer-like noises and feigning great fear when 
   the baby appears to be about to land on Planet Earth. 
 
Note:  Wear protective clothing for the preceding two games. 
 
 o Attack of the Baby-eaters:  Lay the baby on the floor, face up. 
   Announce that you are very hungry, and start nibbling at the baby's 
   toes, then its hands, and finally, with great gusto, its stomach. 
   Every now and then, yell, "Great baby!  Delicious!" 
 
After you've had your baby for a while, you should try feeding it some 
solid food.  Many kinds of solid baby foods are available, all of them 
disgusting.  The baby food industry takes things that no normal human 
being would dream of eating (such as beets), grinds them into mush and puts 
them into jars.  Babies would much rather eat the kind of food you eat, such 
as cheeseburgers and beer.  But federal law, passed at the insistence of the 
immensely powerful baby food lobby, requires you to feed your baby mush. 
 
Scientists now know that babies eat solid foods by absorbing them through 
their chins, which is where you should smear the mush if you want a healthy 
baby.  Many inexperienced parents try to feed babies through their mouths. 
This is foolish.  If you put a spoonful of mashed beets into a baby's mouth, 
then another, you may think the baby is actually eating the beets, but it is 
not.  Those beets will never get near the baby's digestive system.  About 
a half hour after you have cleaned up, the baby will start emitting a fine 
spray of mashed beets, like a little beet volcano. 
 
What the baby will put in its mouth is horrible things.  If you put the baby 
on the floor, it will crawl along, looking intently at the floor and ignoring 
all the safe, expensive toys and any bits of actual food that have fallen 
from the highchair, until it finds, in some corner, a piece of maggot-ridden 
waste or, better yet, a small, sharp object covered with lockjaw germs.   
Then, with a motion faster than the adult eye can see, the baby will pop 
this horrible thing into its mouth and chew contentedly for the rest of the 
afternoon. 
 
So, when you see your baby chewing contentedly, you know you have an emergency. 
 
Here is the first thing to remember:  You must not try to reach into the 
baby's mouth and remove the horrible thing.  Put yourself in the baby's 
position:  Here you have worked very hard to find a horrible thing, and along 
comes this giant person, perfectly capable of finding his own horrible thing, 
to take it away.  You'd rather swallow yours than give it up. 
 
So the trick is to come up with something even more horrible than what the 
baby has and pretent to offer it in trade.  You'll have to prepare well in 
advance because babies are much better than adults at finding horrible things. 
So, whenever you're in a disgusting place, such as a public restroom in 
northern New Jersey, keep an eye out for something that would attract a baby-- 
a blob of industrial waste, say, or a decomposed toad that has been lying 
on a highway for three weeks. 
 
Keep this thing in the refrigerator, away from the potato salad, and use it 
to trick the baby into spitting out the horrible thing in its mouth. 
 
After a while, babies get to be pretty hard bargainers.  Sometimes they'll 
demand two or three things before they'll trade.  You'll find yourself 
squatting on the floor like some kind of deranged Arabian rug trader, waving 
little plastic bags of sewage or jellyfish parts enticingly in front of your 
baby's face as it sits and chews contentedly, waiting for your best offer. 
 
It's all part of that special bond that develops between parent and child 
during the first year of life. 
 
 
Copyright Feature Associates 
21 March 1982, Boston Globe