Above average

Yesterday was baby’s one month checkup. Exciting! I know, me too. The main event of the checkup is the weigh-in, where doctors give a thumbs up or thumbs down depending on how much weight your little one has gained. It’s like finding out the result of a week-long sports game, but at stake is the health and brain development of your kid. No pressure!

Good weight gain calls for celebrations. All that hard work Mom put in—waking up every 3 hours and letting baby feed and gnaw on her nipples—it was worth it! But a low weight gain is the opposite. As new parents of a baby with low weight gain you must carry overwhelming shame around for a week, and all the other parents in the waiting room whisper about you for starving your kid, probably.

Ashna lost a bit of weight in week two (Boo! Hiss! Shame!), so as responsible metric-driven parents, we were eagerly anticipating this week’s weigh-in. A 200 gram gain is about average. Obviously, we were hoping for above average.

There’s something that happens to first time Dad’s (who don’t really know what the hell we’re supposed to be doing): we get focused on the tiniest little milestones and metrics. Maybe cause raising a real human is a big project, and it’s more manageable to break down into little accomplishments. So we overanalyse, hoping to be just ahead of schedule, just a little above average. Her weight. Her head circumference. Her ability to hold a gaze. I don’t think I’m the only parent to do it. Maybe this sounds familiar…

“Emma started rolling over already at 3 months old! That’s way sooner than all the other toddlers in our competitive toddler group!”

“Mason is talking now! You can’t her that? Well it sounds like english to me.”

…as if just keeping them alive isn’t a good enough challenge.

Or maybe the desire to be above average is cultural. On average, the average American believes they’re above average. A mathematic impossibility, sure, but self-confidence for the win!

Or maybe it’s just me.

Either way, we’re at the weigh-in (which is starting to feel like the last episode of “The Biggest Loser”, except, you know, the opposite) and the digital scale reads out… 468 GRAMS! A massive weight gain! Friends, that’s way above average. 468! I was about to start whooping and hollering and making fun of the other infants in the waiting room. USA! USA! It was all I needed, scientific evidence that this little girl is above average.

Like me, Ash’s sleeping is above average too.

Basically, she sleeps so soundly that we have to wake her up every four hours to feed. It’s part of the instruction manual she came with. Apparently she loves sleeping so much she’d happily starve herself if we didn’t wake her to eat. The down side is that currently Richenda can’t have more than 3 hours of sleep in a row. Ever. Even when I take the night shift, there’s not much I can do other than gently wake Richenda up and tell her it’s time to feed… again.

On thing about me: I love to sleep, and I’m good at it too. Some people are organised, some people are good at math, I’m good at sleeping long periods of time without waking up. It’s one of my stronger skills. Yesterday I fell asleep watching a movie at 10pm. Some amount of time later when the sun was out Richenda (while feeding) said “Babe, can you make some breakfast?” I checked the time. IT WAS 10AM. I had slept for 12 hours. HALF A DAY SLEEP. Richenda hasn’t slept more than three hours at a time in a month, and I’m over here freaking saturated in sleep. I’m practically flaunting it. I’m swimming in REM cycles, and storing up sleep for rainy days and weeks. Give me a medal for “Most likely to sleep through my kids childhood”.

In that moment,  I’d never been so ashamed of a sleep. In regards to partner support level, I felt below average.

So yesterday, I came up with a plan to redeem myself. If Richenda could just pump some extra milk during the day, I could try bottle feeding the 4am shift, and then Richenda could sleep for eight full hours. I mean, it’s not quite 12, but she was pretty excited about it. Above average sleep for a new Mom, right?

The only thing we didn’t see eye to eye on was how much milk she’d need.

Richenda, along with the Australian Breastfeeding Association, and pretty much all other peer-reviewed evidence based groups, recommend not more than 100ml per feed. But, I reasoned, they don’t know that our daughter is an above average eater! She put on 468 grams! That’s more than double everyone else! She’ll probably want… 200ml!

Fast forward to 4am. Everything was going to plan. Richenda had been asleep for 4 hours. I was still awake, a little too enthusiastic about my new bottle feeding role. I woke Ash up, and she took the bottle like a champ. And it’s wasn’t just imagination, she was absolutely guzzling the bottle! 25ml… 50ml… 75ml… every gulp proved my hypothesis more and more correct. This baby wanted more than 100mls! She was going to crush the 1-month old eating record!

After nearly 150mls, we took a break. I was on top of the world. The nearly empty bottle was proof that she’s was an above average eater. I couldn’t wait to tell mom in the morning.

Then, it started.

Full geyser.

Her stomach just couldn’t hold it, those extra ml’s of milk came right back up. 

Puking rally. Everywhere. All over both of us. The last time I saw someone vomit like that I was living in a college frat house with 7 other guys playing beer pong with Jack Daniels.

As I threw our chunky milked soaked clothes in the laundry, I looked proudly at her sleeping soundly and I thought: That huge projectile vomit… was totally above average.