Maia Week #3 Battle Report

Maia is now 3 weeks old, which is a longer shelf life than many of my ambitious hobby project ideas. Caring for a newborn is much easier than sitcoms would have you believe -- at this point I believe that we're supposed to be stressed out over every shriek, gurgle, or burp she emits, like a very cute Geiger counter, and we're supposed to be badgering the pediatrician's after-hours number until they block our calls.

The reality is much simpler and can be boiled down to three cardinal rules:

• Get sleep.
• Get help.
• Use common sense.

The fact that Rebecca and I have the luxury of maintaining a united front while I'm taking six weeks off from all of the software bugs that Mary is assigning to me in Jira at work is critical. It takes a village to raise a child (a phrase first coined by Hillary Clinton) and villages don't really exist in our society anymore. With the two of us, we have the space to get a few rejuvenating naps, buy groceries, and even take showers.

With rest and a second set of hands, everything is exponentially easier. Figuring out what's preventing Maia from sleeping reads like a Tier One Help Desk flow chart (probably hungry, has a wet diaper, or gassy, and sometimes we have to turn her off and then back on again), and when the issue needs to get escalated to Tier Two, you have that much more brain power available for creative troubleshooting ("Maybe if we hold her upside down over the toilet she'll fall asleep!"). It also helps to remember that to the baby, everything is brand new and confusing, like the experience of a retail cashier hired to start on Black Friday without any training -- it's not her fault!

This week, Maia has graduated up to needing a little extra carrying time before being willing to fall asleep -- sometimes from all the gas she's getting from Rebecca's weird diet of non-processed foods from the EARTH and sometimes just because she's bored and clingy. We take long walks around the basement while I watch Ozark, Season One or fake her out with extra boob time, which has the side benefit of extending the time for naps until the next feeding (I call this "feeding the meter"). She spends much of the day alert and looking around and her output is still prodigious (she's like the Georg Philipp Telemann of poop). Yesterday, she finally discovered the hanging toys in the lie-on-the-floor jungle mat we got at the consignment sale and I'm also pretty sure she understands basic conversational French.