Dad Files: 2 Month Insights: Blowouts, Booger Picking, and Growing Strength

Baby will exhibit increasing strength. If you are doing skin to skin and have hair on your chest, you may consider shaving it or baby will rip it out by the fistful. With increasing strength, baby will also frequently break out of swaddles making you wonder whether he will pursue a career in escape artistry or strongman competitions in the future. This will heighten vigilance in proper swaddle technique particularly when desiring sleep. Baby’s head will remind you of a bobble head as he builds neck strength. Recoil in conjunction with burps may surprise you with increasing power.

When you arrive home from work, your spouse will hand him off after a day of fussiness so she can have a break. It may seem that all the baby is interested in when you get home is screaming at you especially if you’ve had a hard and stressful day at work. You will do anything possible to get him to go to sleep including beatboxing while assisting him with interpretive dance, bicep curls and triceps extensions with baby, tummy time, bouncing on knee, singing lullabies, whistling classical music, yelling back at baby (not effective), praying for relief, holding baby tightly, rocking baby, rubbing baby’s back, walking lap after lap around the house with baby, feeding, burping, changing diaper, changing diaper again, taking baby on walks outside, and anything else your sleep deprived mind comes up with.

You may sing popular songs on the radio to baby, worship songs, or even revert to your own childhood nursery singalongs. What comes out in your most desperate sleep deprived times digs deep to the core of your being.

If you keep baby with you during a church service, he may make joyful noises unto the Lord at inappropriate times. This will give you the opportunity to better acquaint yourself with the halls and parking lot of the church with baby while your spouse completes the service independently.

Doctors and nurses will poke, prod, and stick baby at checkups. You will need to take on faith that it is for baby’s long term good because short term will likely increase fussiness and screaming sessions.

A constipated baby will make you miss all those number 2 diaper changes. You will pray fervently for the bowels to resume normal function and with every passing of gas compulsively check diaper for poop. Once a juicy one finally comes to fruition, you will rejoice with songs of praise and thanksgiving.

On the other side of the spectrum, you will sometimes wonder if there is an immediate path from mouth to diaper and whether skipping the baby and pouring milk directly on the diaper would be more efficient.

The first public bathroom diaper change is an adventure. By this time you should be fairly experienced in diaper changes but the road game aspect adds a whole other dimension. If there are others in the bathroom, it can almost take on a public performance element. For my first one at Olive Garden, it was a major blowout with runny brown poo pudding covering all of baby’s lower half and exceeded the bounds of the diaper traveling half way up his back calling into question the wisdom of putting the onesie back on. He did well for most of the process with only three other patrons passing through until at the end the whaaaaaa alarm started going off and I was frantically rushing to avoid full on nuclear meltdown echoing through the bathroom chamber. I took baby back to the table with just a diaper on and with a harried look in my eye handed him off to my wife and went to get a new change of clothing from the car. Incidentally, my personal opinion is that just a diaper is a viable wardrobe choice.

Blowouts while traveling in the car will most likely be discovered as you are arriving for an event making an on time arrival shift to tardiness and a very messy cleanup in the backseat of the car. Probably in the range of a 12 wipe cleanup. You should always have a backup change of clothes for both baby and you. Woe to you if you don't take precautions.

You may never have picked someone else’s nose before. This likely will change. While snot sucking instruments can be helpful for the juicy ones, boogers on the dry side may need manual encouragement.

Keeping baby on a schedule and regular routines will benefit everyone involved. The feeding schedule in particular is similar to feeding a parking meter. You may skate by beyond the meter’s expiration but at the risk of a full throated rebuke from the pediatric parking attendant.

In pursuit of His best,

Andrew