Well almost everything (hedging for the unknown...and the fact that I am writing this after only one newborn care course.)
Still, as I settled into my first "Happy, Healthy Baby Class" at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, I was oddly comforted to read the first bullet point on the handout - "Watch the color of the urine, which should be pale yellow or clear..." I turned to Lindsay, smiled and said, "He should be 'peeing clear!' " I was using a term that we both learned while training for Ironman triathlons that means "well-hydrated," and I was smiling from ear-to-ear.
The Baby Industrial Complex (channel partner and co-conspirator with the Wedding Industrial Complex) can be intimidating -- characterized by abundant, often conflicting and usually expensive advice. I was elated to have a medical professional tell me something that made simple sense and that tied into the passion/obsession that introduced me to my wife.
Some other interesting parallels:
-Full-term, full-size babies are born with 48 hours of fuel reserves. Actually, this is not like Mommy and Daddy when they were doing triathlons...but Daddy is jealous and would have loved to have entered a race with just 25% of that.
-When they are running low on food, babies first burn glycogen reserves in their livers, then fat stores, and finally protein in their muscles. You don't want to get to the protein phase. Nobody is happy. Perfect parallel to the adult distance athlete.
-If the bottle isn't positioned correctly, the baby doesn't get enough fuel. I always wished that the Gatorade I spilled on myself would translate to energy, but it never did. So I learned to latch.
-Babies give visible, civil and manageable signals when they are hungry. If you respond to these initial signals, life is good. if you don't, they bonk, and a meltdown follows. Ditto.
Gear offers some other comfortable parallels, and I certainly need to work on my Pack-N-Play transition times. I fear that my current 3:07 break-down time will be insufficient in the face of an accelerated-boarding-to-beat-incoming-inclement-weather situation at SFO. More on that to follow.
-HammerHead
