The Early Shift: Mewling and Puking

Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here. May 30 “There’s no weekend.” I remember thinking that night after night in the early going, as I held Derek Jr. in my arms while everyone else slept. There’s no weekend. In baseball, they talk about the grind of a long season. Even the off days are rarely actual days off because there’s so much travel involved. Everyone’s banged up. Everyone’s fighting to get proper nutrition and enough sleep. I don’t know if it’s true, but I remember reading somewhere that ballplayers consider a day game followed by a night game essentially a day off, just because they finally get an evening to themselves. Anyway, that’s what I used to think in the dark in the wee hours of the morning, feeling new aches in my arms or my neck or my back or all three. There is no weekend. There is no day off. Saturday has come and gone, and I’m up in the middle of the night with Derek Jr. Sunday will come, and I’ll again be up in the middle of the night with Derek Jr. This was my first week back at work, and I’m pretty proud of myself. It was a short week because of Memorial Day, and I published five pieces and answered a mailbag question. But it was a grind. Between all that and trying to keep up with this journal, there was so much racing through my mind that I had trouble sleeping at night, and I was in such a rush to get my work done that I never had time to sneak in a nap. Here’s a note from, well, I’m not sure when, but some time this week that I didn’t have the time or energy to flesh out into a full entry: So I am not exactly crisp. Insomnia has come roaring back this week. Last night, Derek Jr. did amazing, sleeping pretty soundly from 7:30 PM until nearly 5:00 AM. But she also had to make it through some gas. It woke her up at 11, then 12, one, two, and 3:40. Each time, I was able to get her back down to sleep with the pacifier, but that involved hanging out for at least a few minutes, lurking over her crib in the dark, to make sure that she either fell asleep with it in, or that it fell out in such a way that it wouldn’t disturb her and wake her back up. I was awake from something like 2:00 AM to 6:00 AM. That’s where we are right now. And then the weekend came, and my wife brought up the idea of setting aside some time for each of us to do something that’s important to us. Just a little time, an hour for each of us. We were each going to carve out, somewhere within the greater not-a-weekend weekend, an actual little one-hour weekend. It was a great idea. I was going to work on music. I have this children’s song called “Piggy to the Rescue” that I’ve been playing for Derek Jr. from time to time. It just needs a final mix. I actually wrote it years ago, but for some reason, I never finished recording it. I found the original file not long before Derek Jr. was born, and this time, the whole thing came together in a snap. The problem was with the chorus, which started with a long “Ohhh.” It made the song drag right when it should’ve been be amping up. I swapped in a new exclamation and everything clicked. I recorded all the instruments and vocals, but left the original glockenspiel part from 2013, just because it cracked me up that this freshly-recorded song had one track that’s old enough to be Bar Mitzvahed. It was reassuring to know that I’ve grown as a musician. Back then, I really liked the song, but couldn’t crack it. Now, I can diagnose the problem and knock out the whole song in an afternoon: You Aren't a FanGraphs Member It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed. We get it. You want to read this article. 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A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members. 10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features! We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it. So that was the plan for Saturday. Just a teeny-tiny, infant-adjusted weekend. None of it worked out. Something was off with Derek Jr. all day. She just couldn’t seem to sleep unless someone was holding her. One of my wife’s friends was visiting, and she was happy to hold Derek Jr. for an hour or so, which really saved us. It was such a brutal day that I was too tired to mix the song, but I was able to use that hour to take a nap. That was my weekend. But it was all hands on deck all day, and my wife bore the brunt of it. We couldn’t tell what was wrong with Derek Jr. She was constantly presenting signs of hunger, and we reluctantly, incrementally fed her more than we were comfortable feeding her, well aware that sometimes she indicates hunger for reasons other than hunger. We are really trying not to overfeed her, but we are also trying to take care of her. It’s a constant push and pull in this house. How much food does she need? How much food is safe to give her? After a rough day, we finally decided to hold firm on the bedtime routine that seems to work for her. We fed her, gave her a bath, and my wife topped her off with a little more milk as I read to the two of them. It took a while, because Derek Jr. kept signaling for more and more milk, and she kept drinking everything we gave her. Eventually we figured that maybe she was just much hungrier than we’d thought. Maybe that’s what this whole day was about. She wasn’t getting enough to eat, and that snowballed into not enough sleep, which snowballed into fussiness, which snowballed into even less sleep, which snowballed into more fussiness, and on and on. Eventually, it seemed like it would be possible to actually get Derek Jr. on the path to sleep. That’s my specialty, so I told my wife she needed a break. She’d been on duty for too long already. While she went and relaxed, I rocked Derek Jr for 30 or 40 minutes, until she was in a deep enough sleep that when her pacifier fell out, she didn’t even notice it. That tends to be the signal that I can safely get her swaddled and put her down to bed in a good place. She’ll wake up during the swaddling, but just a little bit, and I can get her right back to sleep and into the crib. I brought her over to the futon and gently got her all set up in her walrus pajamas. The walrus pajamas, I should mention, are the most adorable things I’ve ever seen in my life. She is so cute in those walrus pajamas. The walruses wear ski caps for some reason. I guess they do live in a cold climate. I’m not complaining. Every time I see Derek Jr. covered in those walruses in their winter wear, it’s so sweet I could die. If you were to leave me with only one memory of my time with this child, it might just be her in those walrus pajamas. Anyway, I got her in the pajamas and then swaddled her up and was just about to lift her over toward the crib when she threw up. I’ve mentioned spitting up a few times in this journal. Derek Jr. has spit up plenty of times. Some of those times, I would have told you that she had surpassed the spitting-up threshold and moved into the land of throwing up. I would have been wrong. She had never thrown up before. This was throwing up, and it was intense and scary. Derek Jr. was swaddled, so she couldn’t move much. She was flat on her back on the futon, my arms underneath her, and then all of a sudden her eyes opened a little wider and her mouth pooled up and overflowed with enormous quantities of bright white milk. The whole thing probably took five seconds, but it involved three separate batches of milk, rising from the depths of her stomach and pouring everywhere. Parenting books often reassure you that when a baby spits up or throws up, they’re not producing nearly as much liquid as it appears. A normal spit-up is probably somewhere around three-quarters of a teaspoon (sorry, I’m a baker), but when it absorbs into clothes or bedding, it spreads out, which makes it look worse than it is. This was different. Each one of these three eruptions had to be a couple tablespoons. We’re talking about something like a third of a cup of milk, sour and acrid and thick because it was mixed with stomach acid, flooding out of her mouth and down her neck to her chest, and then wrapping around, matting in her hair and clothes. Derek Jr. seemed unbothered during all of this. Her face betrayed no particular emotions. I imagine she was finally feeling relief. After a whole day of discomfort, what needed to happen had finally happened. But it was terrifying to watch. I can still see it so clearly. I shouted for my wife. Her weekend was officially over. I now realize that I don’t even know what she did with her time off. She grabbed Derek Jr., shucked off the walrus pajamas, and got her in an emergency bath, while I grabbed everything that had been covered in vomit — pajamas, swaddle, sheets, mattress pad, burp cloths, my own clothes — and ran it over to the washing machine. Those poor walruses. Derek Jr. was happy as can be during her second bath of the evening, and then she slept for seven hours straight. But I’m still shaken by the experience. I felt so helpless. I can only imagine how horribly scary and uncomfortable it would have been for her had it happened a few minutes later, when she was all alone in the dark in her crib. It was terrifying to see her mouth fill up with milk like that. It was so bright. It’s silly, but I keep thinking of “The Whiteness of the Whale,” the chapter in Moby-Dick where Ishmael waxes poetic about what makes the great whale so scary. “There yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood. This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.” Maybe he was onto something. When I was 13, a semi-truck clipped me while I was riding a bike. I flipped over the handlebars faster than my brain could process such a thing. I just suddenly found myself on the ground. I was fine, apart for some wicked road rash and a big gash on my right leg. It didn’t even hurt. I got up off the pavement, started to walk, then looked down and saw the wound. It was deep and wide, with the tiniest trickle of blood dribbling down toward my foot, but the thing that made me decide I’d better sit back down and wait for help was that right in the center, far deeper than you’d expect it, my shin bone shone just as pure and bright as what I saw tonight. I also keep thinking about the seven ages of man, the soliloquy from As You Like It. Jacques sums up the first age as “the infant mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.” Derek Jr. has never been much of a mewler, and until tonight, she’d never done any puking. I guess, in that sense, she’s finally achieved the first age. May 31 My wife has been reading about how sticking to a consistent bedtime routine can help your baby fall asleep each night, so we’ve been working on implementing one. One of the things we’ve started doing is reading to Derek Jr. with the lights low right before her last meal of the night. We started with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and it remains a delight. My wife isn’t sure if she ever read it when she was a kid. I know I read it a million times, but it doesn’t matter. We’re both enthralled. Every night after bath time, we dim the lamp to its lowest setting. My wife rocks Derek Jr. in the rocking chair while I sit on the floor and read. We know Derek Jr. is a long way from understanding any of the words flowing over her, but it feels really special to be starting her life with her parents reading to her before bed each night. It may be a bit trite, but this is the kind of thing we always envisioned doing with our child. We’re both writers. One of the hardest things we had to do to get our apartment ready for Derek Jr. was downsizing our book collections. It was a genuine source of conflict. But we haven’t shied away from adding and adding to our collection of children’s books. They were the only thing we asked for at my wife’s baby shower. Derek Jr.’s bookshelf is already at double its capacity. This isn’t her first exposure to literature. When I’m holding her late at night and I’m all sung out, I recite the handful of poems and Shakespeare passages that I committed to memory over the years while bored at various office jobs. I’d pick a passage I liked and type it into Microsoft Word over and over and over again as fast as I could until I had the whole thing memorized. It was one of the more productive things I ever did while sitting in an office. There in the dark, however, I realized that Hamlet’s soliloquy and the death of Ophelia were maybe a tad depressing for a newborn, and I probably shouldn’t be throwing around the phrase “you unnatural hags” in the presence of my daughter. But Charlie and the Chocolate Factory feels right. Or at least, it feels right until we get to Chapter 10, which is titled “The Family Begins to Starve.” As depressing five-word short stories go, that one’s hard to beat. My wife fairly guffaws when she hears me read it aloud. From that point on, each time we reach a new chapter, before I read the actual title, my wife and I pitch the most macabre possibilities we can think of: Chapter 11: Charlie’s Parents Initiate Divorce Proceedings Chapter 12: Grandpa Joe Dies of Natural Causes Chapter 13: Mike Teavee Gets Run Over by a Fire Truck and Dragged for Several Blocks Chapter 14: Augustus Gloop Captures and Eats an Oompa Loompa, And, to Charlie’s Horror, Nobody Seems To Mind All That Much Chapter 15: It Turns Out the Factory Is Not OSHA Compliant Chapter 16: Veruca Salt Sucks on a Candy Cane Until the End Is as Sharp as a Pin and Uses It To Pop Violet Beauregard Like a Balloon Chapter 16: Strychnine Chapter 17: Further Stabbings Chapter 18: Willy Wonka Reveals Himself To Be a Crypto Guy June 2 My wife discovered a game that cracks Derek Jr. up. She has a new version of the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.” She keeps the melody, but on each beat, she taps Derek Jr. with the pad of her index finger, announcing the body part she’s tapping as she goes. She mainly sticks to the nose, chin, and ears, which makes her look an awful lot like a college baseball coach signaling what pitch the catcher should call, except instead of doing it on their own face, the coach has brought a baby into the dugout and is signaling on the baby’s face. Derek Jr. can’t get enough of it, and her little proto-laugh cracks us up to no end: http://blogs.fangraphs.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Head-Shoulders-Knees-and-Toes-Game.m4aJune 3 My parents are in town to spend a couple days with Derek Jr. This is their second visit. They came up the day we left the hospital and spent 10 days helping out, but they are now visiting a very different baby. My dad had a broken thumb during the first visit, but he still had no problem tucking newborn Derek Jr. into the crook of his arm while chatting or reading the paper. His thumb is healed up now, but he actually has a harder time corralling her. Derek Jr. has expanded so rapidly that when I deposit her sleeping into his arms, he looks like he’s attempting to cradle a medium-sized bomb. I know I’ve mentioned several times in this journal that I don’t burp Derek Jr. nearly as hard as the nurses at the hospital, but it turns out that I have slowly turned into them. I’m feeding Derek Jr. when my parents arrive, and I start to burp her as they get settled on the couch. My dad winces. He can’t believe how hard I’m whacking her on the back. I knew I was getting more comfortable with the process, but I guess I didn’t realize how far I’d come. It probably doesn’t help that I have also started bouncing Derek Jr. on my shoulder in time with each whack, and then, more recently, splitting the whacks into groups of three and chanting “Where’s my burps? Where’s my burps?” like a mob enforcer collecting a gambling debt from a deadbeat down on the docks. Look, the nights are long. You need to make your own fun. My parents inform me that they’ve been reading this journal. Their main takeaway is that Derek Jr. sounds a lot like Derek Jeter. My dad is very confused. He raised me an Orioles fan. Loathing the Yankees is my birthright, and now his granddaughter’s nickname seems to be an homage to one of their stars. I assure him that this is a coincidence. In truth, it had never even occurred to me. I do not love it. But it’s a little late in the game to rename her.