Grains of Salt

The best pre-baby-having advice I ever got was Do What Works. For us, that meant that Alex slept in his carrier on the floor of the bathroom with the fan on for the first two months of life. How we stumbled upon this magical formula for FIVE CONSECUTIVE HOURS OF SLEEP I don’t know (it resulted from a desperate act of sleep deprivation, no doubt, i.e. “I dunno what to do anymore, just put him in the bathroom!”) but try telling new parents that it’s wrong to put the baby on the bathroom floor in his car seat despite the priceless benefits ... You won’t get far. We encountered a problem in Week 3 when we went to the beach with our Texas family and the otherwise magnificent house we were renting had an ant problem. Even a sleep-starved half-crazy-with-anxiety first-time mom can’t abide the thought of ants crawling on her newborn (regardless of whether or not he would’ve slept through it, and I have a sneaking suspicion he would have).

The rules of having a newborn are pretty basic. Keep it safe, keep it fed, keep it clean. That doesn’t factor in the arbitrary MUSTs you’ll get from every direction, from (usually) well-meaning been-there-done-that moms: Pacifiers are a necessity. (Or, conversely, pacifiers are E-VILLE.) Breastfeed or risk raising a halfwit. Swaddle, for God’s sake, SWADDLE! And my personal fave: Sleep when the baby sleeps. (If you’ve ever had raging anxiety-induced insomnia and a newborn who is a noisy sleeper, you’ll know that’s simply not an option.)

But it’s all moot, because at the end of the day you’ll Do What Works. Some babies need that paci (and if yours does you might regret it until that glorious day when he can actually keep the damn thing in his mouth!) Some moms try to nurse but switch to formula when nursing begins to trigger uncontrollable weepy emotional upheavals. (Um, so I HEAR.) Some parents never get the hang of swaddling, or can’t get comfortable with turning their baby into a burrito. Some babies sleep only under a painfully specific set of circumstances, and woe be to anyone who deviates from the system even a millimeter. Those kids turn out fine, too. Those kids turn out ... Alex.