Author: Roger Starkey

Most parents imagine great things for their infants; future world leader, future Nobel Prize winning scientist, future Olympic bronze-medal winning trampoline “athlete.” Perhaps the two months that I’ve been on lock down with my son has caused me to be a bit touched, but my dreams for him are more pedestrian and much more immediate. In my mind he is already dominating the infant stand-up circuit with material such as this.

A lot of times I wake up in the middle

The following is a list of Facebook status’ that my eight-week-old son would post if he had sorted out that typing thing.

1. Holding my pee until the next diaper change, hoping to get it on dad this time. If I miss the old man, again, I hope to at least go higher on the wall than any previous shots
2. Balding (do they make infant Rogaine?)
3. Waiting for my parents to get some girls up into this place
4. Just farted

I was recently attempting to change my son’s diaper while his arms and legs were flailing at the air as fast as he could make them go–he was seemingly trying to crawl through the air to escape the experience (why would an infant prefer caked dung on his bottom to a clean diaper?). Then, like any parent of more than one day, I immediately plopped a pacifier in his mouth, rendering the child as pliant as a cult member’s mind.

This

A baby’s weight is expected to double between birth and five months. My powerhouse eating preemie is on pace to accomplish this in about two months. The medical professionals might say it has something to do with his special high-calorie formula, but in my arrogance, I’d like to think it’s really due to his exceptional eating and evacuation habits, as well as my wife’s and my ability to read his cues.

How We Know When Our Boy Wants a Bottle in His Gob

My child recently turned five weeks-old and was born six-weeks premature. Despite these statistics, I’m rather sure that I can already detect a preternatural intellect. His genius is most on display when he is in the process of defecation. The medical professionals will tell you that the wry smile or wide grin is a natural reaction to gas, but I know that he is barely containing his mirth at his own thoughts. Here is a sampling of some of those thoughts:

I used this space previously to document my unfamiliarity with nursery rhymes and my compensatory creations.  I recently decided that I needed to do some research and teaching so my kid wouldn’t be mocked by his daycare colleagues when he turned up singing of monkeys eating fruit with a kid called Seamus.  When I started the arduous task of Googling “nursery rhymes,” I assumed that my amateur lyrics were shameful in comparison to the sweet words that have lulled children to sleep for centuries.  I

Staring at my alert child at 3:00 AM this morning, two things occurred to me: my little guy needed a gentle lullaby to help him sleep and I don’t know any lullabies. I couldn’t let my lack of intimacy with the lullaby music genre impede my child’s sleep, so I made up a few ditties on the spot. Below are the lyrics to my creations, along with suggestions for songs which could be, with the right tone, turned into a

I once made a passing remark about how peacefully my son slept while being held.  “Wouldn’t we all sleep better if we were held?”, was the response.  That comment has troubled me since.

I am roughly three times the size of my son, so I began to picture myself as a full-grown man being held by a comic book-like, giant version of myself as I tried to nestle into his over hairy arms for an afternoon nap.  The visual is disturbing!