The Newborn Connection

[velvetpage]

Posted for the benefit of curtana. Others amongst you may appreciate it. I've posted it before, I think, but I'm too lazy to search my lj for it when I can pull it up in Word much faster.



The Newborn Connection – The Parent Hop

Warning: Any newborn who is found to have revealed the existence of the Connection to anyone over the age of one year will be immediately stricken from the mailing list.

The topic of our column today is one of our most frequently asked questions, a source of concern to many in our membership. How, precisely, is the Parent Hop to be played? We have compiled a list of time-honoured strategies, practised by babies since the dawn of time. Fell free to mix and match, and remember that the more often you use a strategy, the less effective it will become.

The object of the game is to see your own needs met fully while simultaneously depriving your parents of as many of their needs as possible. There are many ways to achieve this. In fact, you are probably using several already.

Fast Food Feeding

Demand to be fed as often as possible, especially after dark. Eight feeds while it’s dark out is a good number. For this strategy to work, it is very important that you eat for no more than five minutes at a time. This strategy is guaranteed to turn nursing mothers in particular into irritable zombies almost immediately.

Unpacified

Refuse to be soothed by any method which will allow your parent to leave you alone. Eschew the soother! Cry until they pick you up. Require that a parental finger be left in your mouth at night, all night. Thumbs are for sissies, unless of course the thumb belongs to Daddy. Music is an acceptable soother, but only while the parent is actually singing. These methods will allow you to rest during the times when the required soothing is happening. Your parents, however, will soon be nervous wrecks, hoping that this time you’ll stay asleep.

Diaper Derby

Unlike the Derby that Daddy watches on TV, the goal is to fill your diaper at precisely the right moment to create maximum havoc. We suggest starting with something messy and smelly. Quantity is good at this point, since parents can ignore anything which stays inside the diaper. The real derby begins when the diaper comes off. Wetting just as the diaper is removed from under the bottom is very effective. Equally so is another mess, after the first has been thoroughly cleaned. The male members have an advantage over the female in that they can direct the wet. A well-timed and –aimed wet can spark a cleaning of self, room, and parent. One benchmark for success could be the speed with which parents change shifts so one can take a shower.

Comments

[midnightsangel.livejournal.com]

Very very cute.

:)

[hillarygayle.livejournal.com]

Uhhhh, and I'm trying to have kids WHY, again?

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Oh, this only lasts a few months at most. I wrote it in my head, since my hands were busy, in the middle of some seriously sleep-deprived nights.

After the first few months of this kind of sleep deprivation, you get other kinds of joys. Various methods of getting baby to go to sleep, sewing screens for your bookcases so that you're not gluing pages back in on a regular basis, discovering that none of the commercially available babyproofing gadgets fit the fixtures in your house - it never ends.

But really, you've read my stories of Elizabeth. Who wouldn't want that much cuteness in their lives?

[collie13.livejournal.com]

You're a very, very brave woman. ;)

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Honestly, i think that describes everyone who loves someone else.

[curtana.livejournal.com]

Heh, that's great, thanks for sharing it! Arthur slept really well last night, in fact, only waking once for the first time. Of course, I woke up in a puddle of milk, but on the plus side, I got easily the most sleep I've gotten since I was about 8 months pregnant :)

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I was lucky that way - I never leaked. But I remember the first time Elizabeth slept six hours straight. It was marvelous.