Grasshopper New Media Presents...

Before becoming a stay-at-home parent, I had an only-slightly-less-cool job: I got to teach animal husbandry to teen volunteers at a wildlife rehabilitation center. I got to know dozens of kids and learned all sorts of tricks to teach, entertain, and learn from them.

So, as I looked forward to the arrival of Boobaby, I thought I was pretty well prepared. Even though I could count on two hands the babies I had held before, I knew that many other new dads — and a fair number of the moms, too — were similarly inexperienced. With all my years of teaching, I thought, parenting would be a snap, right?

As it turns out, no. All that I know about older kids was completely irrelevant to the job of caring for my little Boobaby in her first year. Luckily, what I knew about animals was actually quite applicable, and so I began to rethink the adventure as not so much “mentorship of a child” as “husbandry of an animal.” Here’s what I gleaned from my years at the animal hospital that was really useful:

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• Get over gross.

OK, there’s a fair bit that’s smelly, slimy, and not entirely toothsome about being a dad. I was helping to dissect a dead whale once when the pathologist taught me a crucial fact: The human body acclimates to a bad smell in 17 seconds. If you can keep from tossing your cookies for that long (count it out!), then you’re fine. Your brain has incredible power to protect you from your body’s inner revulsion.

Besides, the coolest things in life are gross.

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• Stay calm, or at the very least, fake it.

If I go into an animal enclosure feeling a high level of stress, the animals are more likely to behave erratically. The same is true of a child: even at a week old, my baby girl responded to tension in the air. I’m sure I wasn’t unique among first-time parents in feeling overwhelmed and incompetent at times. The trick I learned from the animals, though, is not to show it to my baby. If I pretended I was relaxed and ready, more often than not, she would calm down, too.

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• Have “kits.”

At the animal hospital, we pack everything necessary for a particular operation into a single toolkit: we have a blood draw kit, a tube feeding kit, and so on. At home, we’ve made several kits, too, even if that means some duplication. We have a “grooming kit” with hairbrush, nail clippers, and some extra hair clips, but we also have a hairbrush in our “short outing” kit and our “long outing” kit, plus one at the changing table. Four hairbrushes may seem silly, but the time (and tantrums!) we save when searching for one of them is precious.

Also, even though we think we know everything that should go into each kit, we’ve gone ahead and made ourselves lists. My two favorite grown-up toys are my label maker and my laminator: I’ve got laminated lists of things that go into each kit right on the bag or box that contains it. The big payoff for this label-craziness is for two-parent families: you never have to ask what’s missing from each kit, and even babysitters and grandparents can get into the act.

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• Clean the major mess first, then do the detail work.

Animals make messes, especially baby animals who don’t know better. For a baby seal who’s decorated its cage with poop, that means hosing down the cage, carefully cleaning and rinsing the fur, and finally using a disinfectant on the umbilical stump. We use a similar strategy when Boobaby has a 3 a.m. poop explosion all over the bedclothes. First off, we get that baby undressed and all the poopy clothes and sheets wrapped up, then we wipe the body and hair, and finally the bum and private parts, changing wipes and washing hands in between.

The difference between overwhelming and manageable is as simple as having a system.

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• Make a plan. Be ready to ditch it.

This is possibly the hardest and most rewarding of all the lessons I’ve learned from working with animals. Whenever I go in to feed or perform a treatment on an animal, I briefly go over in my head what I expect to happen and how I’m going to get there: I make a plan. Animals are unpredictable, though, and often as not, the pup that normally allows itself to be restrained and fed decides one day not to put up with that sort of treatment. On the spot, my plan goes out the window and I come up with a new strategy.

The same goes for my baby. If anything, I have to be even more flexible about my expectations because my human child learns new things so much faster than my animal charges. My Boobaby had a horrible “witching hour” until she was about six months old. Every time I would try to calm her, I made my plan to do what had worked in the past: bouncing on the yoga ball, for example, or rocking her, or walking around. After each strategy was working for about a week, though, Boo would suddenly become resistant and cry out louder. In that moment, I had to switch from my carefully-considered plan and try something new.

Working with animals forces me into a state of attentiveness that is at the same time detached from my ego. I don’t feel guilty or inept when a baby animal is crying out for something; I just try to figure out what need isn’t getting met
and meet it as best I can. Although it’s harder, I still try to get to that state of alert objectiveness when working with my own baby. It’s worked pretty well for the first year.

Now she’s becoming a little girl, however. Time to re-learn everything I thought I knew. Again!

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[tags]baby, kids, mess, gross, technique[/tags]

Photo graciously provided by Johnny Huh, under a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved