When
I was eight and a half months pregnant, we received a visit from our best
friends, Rhett and Stacy, who are both pharmacists. This visit gave us a
somewhat skewed perception of what parenthood would be like. Rhett and
Stacy were accompanied by their 5 week old son, Wyatt, who had slept like an angel the entire 9 hour car ride. The morning after their arrival, we
took the baby out to a nice brunch, and then later that evening, to a fancy
restaurant for dinner. Both times, he dozed happily in his baby carrier,
while the adults enjoyed cocktails and grown-up conversations about music,
politics, and other non-baby-poop related topics. Since Millie’s birth I’ve
been thinking more and more about this visit, and I’ve concluded that--- even
though they are the best sort of people imaginable –there certainly appears to
be a suspicious link between their son’s behavior and their access to
prescription grade Ambien.
Emboldened
by their success, and by the assurances of EVERY SINGLE person we have
ever met that car trips are soothing to babies, we have taken Millie on two
road trips in her first three months of life. She travels pretty well, as long
as you completely redefine the meaning of the word “well.” Of course, traveling
with an infant is never for the faint of heart, and we wouldn’t have taken her
at all if we didn’t have a REALLY good reason for going. In our case,
that reason is that we no longer have any brains whatsoever, and that portion
of our heads which used to contain our brains now contains frozen lasagna, on
which we have subsisted on almost exclusively since Millie’s birth.
Since
I’m not sure about how my new, lasagna-based brain will perform in terms of
long term memory retention, I’ve decided to jot down a few reminisces of our
first road trips so we can share them with our daughter someday.
To
Millie—this is important--- when I am very very old, and you are deciding what
type of nursing home to place me in—I want you to go back and re-read these
stories and ask yourself, “does my mother really deserve to be placed in this
cheap, low budget nursing home? Or, doesn’t she deserve to be in a more
spa-like atmosphere, you know, like one where the cafeteria pudding is made
with organic coco and agave nectar, and instead of bingo they have mandatory
holistic massage and acupuncture??” Think about it.
Today’s
story is:
Episode
1: Millie’s first French Kiss.
Sean
was a new dad. As a new father, he ranked child: car safety as the highest
priority, and very soon after Millie’s conception began to read consumer
reports with an intensity heretofore reserved for planning camping trips and
discussing German automobiles. In the course of his research, he learned that
the ABSOLUTE SAFEST PLACE for the baby’s carseat to ride, was in the very
middle of the backseat, facing backwards of course.
Now,
up until the baby arrived, the back seat was the excusive domain of our 70 lb
Labrador, Cricket, and she considered every inch of this space necessary for
the stretching, moping, sleeping, and drooling required of her on these
occasions. On Millie’s first road trip, we did not leave the dog at home. We
packed the baby into the car, and called for the dog to “kennel up.” When
she did so, she was faced with an upsetting new reality. The carseat was
in the middle of the back seat. HER backseat. A back seat that, while
admittedly a little on the small side, was just large enough for a Labrador to
ride in tolerable comfort to South Carolina and back. Now, to her horror, her
riding space had been reduced by two thirds.
We
started the car, and Cricket’s concern was heightened when the quiet and
solicitude she had come to depend on during these car rides was interrupted by
an insufferable wailing. She had heard this noise before. The sounds of
the baby crying. At the time, I was riding, (in my arrogance,) in
the “Shotgun” position next to Sean. We weren’t surprised when Millie
started crying, but we both looked forward to watching our colicky baby succumb
to the narcoleptic properties of long car rides that had been prophesied
to us by our friends.
Sure
enough, within a few minutes of our drive, the crying abruptly stopped.
We breathed a sigh of relief. That was AMAZING we told each other--- it’s
like someone flipped a switch and turned the crying off! We rode for a
few seconds in the golden silence until, to our horror, the unmistakable sounds
of a slurping Labrador tongue issued from the backseat, followed by a muffled
baby cry. "GOOD HEAVENS!" We cried, in our most polite voices,
not saying any cuss words at all! "STOP THAT CRICKET!"
For
months now, Cricket had been telling us, "Guys, I know how to make that baby
stop crying--- just let me lick her in the face." When she finally
got the opportunity to test her hypothesis with both of her meddling parents in
the front seat and out of arm's reach-- she seized this opportunity with both
paws, and-- as fate would have it-- a tongue. I'll have to give her this,
Millie definitely stopped crying. I'm not going to pretend that I didn't
panic for a few hours after I extracted the dog from the baby-- after all-- I
know exactly where that tongue has been. But, Millie didn't show any
immediate signs of any dog-borne diseases, and after a few hours I began to
relax. In fact, what with the severe thunderstorm, and the car breaking on the
side of the road later on that very evening, there were a few times I was
tempted to say "Hey Cricket. I think the baby needs another
kiss..." But those stories can wait for a different day, because
right now the oven is beeping, and I need to start my frozen lasagna.
Little do you know, you have fallen for the oldest trick in Wyatt's book - pretend to be perfect around Mom and Dad's friends so you have a place to crash when mom and dad kick you out for being a douchebag in the middle of the night. And maybe Cricket's right; maybe we all need a little more dog tongue in our lives!
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