Babies are kind of dumb. I don’t mean that in the pejorative sense. They just don’t happen to know anything at all. It’s not really their fault. They have a brand new brain and need to take some time arranging and filling it up. Their brain doesn’t really work like your brain does, not yet. This is a critically important thing to understand. It will save you a lot of frustration over time.

There are a lot of things that babies do that can annoy people. Non-stop crying. Making messes. Dropping things over and over again. It’s very easy for a parent to begin to anthropomorphize their baby’s actions. The baby is not doing things to irritate you. It doesn’t know what it is to irritate someone. It’s not even cognizant of its own emotions in a rational way, let alone yours. They’re blank slates, and as such your reactions to their many foibles are very important.

Take crying. It’s their only option. If you can’t stop a baby from crying it’s because that baby is bothered by something. Don’t take it personally. It can’t indicate to you in any useful way for a couple months what it wants or needs. It doesn’t speak your language. It can’t really even see things properly. Most of its limbs don’t really work right, or are ruled by instinctual reflexive responses. All it can do is make noise and hope that the bad things will get better.

The “dropsies” game is another prime example. I’ve been around parents who get fed up with their kid playing the game where you hand it a toy, and it drops it on the floor. And then you get the toy again, and then it drops it on the floor again. When babies are older, repetition is what they like to do. They’re learning about cause and effect. The toy drops, it makes a noise, someone picks it back up and gives it to them. Repeat. Cause and effect is basically the foundation for ALL of your intelligence, so indulge the kid a bit.

This little tid-bit kind of blew my mind when I read it a week or so ago. Consider this same “dropsies” kind of game with a very young baby, a couple months. When that kid drops his toy, as far as he’s concerned that toy has ceased to exist. It has left his sphere of recognition and it may as well have been vaporized. Does the baby seem to get upset when you leave the room? Yeah, it may have just occurred to him that you have VANISHED COMPLETELY FOREVER. Of course, there’s no concept of forever yet, but you can see why it would be upsetting. So any of those little lessons you’ve been trying to impart, think about how well those are sticking around.

Around about 36 weeks old (so roughly nine months), it will be considered a pretty major accomplishment that you baby can now do things like:

– Sit up for 15 minutes.

– Pick things up with fingers.

– Lean without falling over.

Realize that everything your baby does is hard. Things that you now take for granted were the product of, essentially, months of intensive physical therapy for you as an infant. Everything is hard, and sometimes that will be upsetting for a baby and sometimes the fun stuff will be the stuff that might make you crazy. But take it in stride because as your baby gets older, it becomes more and more like a sponge and if it sees that your reactions to everything is to be annoyed and impatient, well, guess what?

This extends even to older kids. They don’t think like us big kids. Prime example: I went to see Avatar opening night in a big-ass IMAX 3D theater. Seated next to me were a husband and wife who had brought their infant (couldn’t have been more than 6 weeks old — she miraculously slept almost the entire 160 minutes of the film) and their two year old girl. The two year old was also pretty well behaved, but she started to want to get up and shake seats in front of her and talk and sing little songs to herself. Her father would lean forward and say things like “Be quiet, honey. Don’t you want to see the rest of the movie?” Well, no. No she does not want to see the rest of the movie. She’s 2. She cannot follow a lengthy dramatic narrative. She doesn’t know what 60% of the words people on the screen are using are.

What I’m saying is, newsflash, kids are not adults. Remember this and try to see the world from their perspective a bit and save yourself and everyone else a bit of stress.

*does a headfake move and dekes around you*

Oh, you fell for my salacious title, did you? Welcome to the blog, sinner. No, this isn’t a post about knowing someone biblically (which, when you think about it, is just a super creepy phrase), it’s a post about the brouhaha surrounding the decision to discover the sex of your baby. What? I could have just called this post “Gender Relations” and it would have been less weird? Nobody asked you.

This seems to have become the hot button issue for expectant parents. Moreso even than the eternal battle of Boy vs. Girl—something I’ll get into in a later post—people have strong feelings about whether or not you should find out the sex of your baby before it arrives. Proponents of finding out seem to be largely motivated by shopping concerns. They’d prefer to be snagging pink and blue items, and not the neutral green and yellow. To be fair, shopping concerns are motivated by excitement over the arrival of a new baby, but it’s a pretty heavily cited reason. Advocates for not finding out cite the excitement and mystery surrounding the whole affair.

Admittedly, as my Dad has said to me, who your baby will be when it arrives is one of the big mysteries in life. What will it look like? Will it be healthy? What will it be like? And, of course, will it be a boy or a girl? Teasing out the discovery at least of the gender until the very end can make for quite the reveal when the day actually comes. It’s pretty tempting. Is it odd that the temptation here is for the delayed gratification? I’m going to say it is.

Now, to save myself from a hailstorm, I’m going to announce that Janelle and I do not know what we plan on doing with this yet. Our appointment is in January and it’s entirely likely that we’re going to pick on the fly just based on our feeling of the situation the day of.

But… my feeling is that the problem with not knowing is very simply the pronoun involved.

It.

My parents managed to sidestep this issue by referring to my sister and I by a generic name when we were in the womb. That way, they didn’t have to always be talking about “it”, like they were discussing an expansion to their master bedroom or something. I think that for me I would have trouble calling the baby by a generic name to give it a bit of a persona to interact with and not just assuming it was a certain gender already. My thinking is that as long as I’m already presupposing a gender, why not just be correct about it? I don’t have a preference for the baby’s gender (not really), but I don’t want to get attached to the idea of a boy or a girl and then risk even having the slightest bit of disappointment that I didn’t get my pick.

But finding out the gender is tricky on the off chance that anyone you know would like it to be a surprise. My Dad, again, would like it to be a surprise, and I don’t particularly want to ruin it for him if we opt to find out. Janelle doesn’t really like surprises; they make her feel anxious when she focuses on them too much. She does, however, like having a secret. If I had to bet, I would say that come January, we’ll opt to find out the baby’s gender—but we aren’t telling.

I’m a good six months away from being a dad and the experience is already giving me some new perspective on the world.

I’m not that old. By most accounts, I’m very young. This is true despite the fact that at my company’s recent Christmas party as Brick House came on and various peoples got up to shake their groove thangs one of my techs, a 21-year-old, looked at me very earnestly and asked “So, is this like your generation’s party music?”

In spite of my youth, I am going to be a father. This is something normally reserved for adults. My entire life, parents have been people who are older than me who, by virtue of their greater experience in life, outrank me. Suddenly, this entire ranking system has either entirely broken down or enveloped me completely, depending on how you look at it. It’s making me think about parents in a very different light. Specifically, my parents.

My parents were only a couple of years older than I am now when they had me and though the times, they are achangin’, it can fairly be assumed that they were living a life not unlike my own. They had hobbies and friends and evening plans that had nothing to do with entertaining me. They were just like me, and let me assure you, I am totally awesome. Ergo…

So much of our perception of our parents is forged in the infernal fires of adolescence, when our brains don’t work right and we are all assholes. What we tend to recall is that our parents are the rulemakers. They are the boundaries that delineate the course of our lives and depending on how they handle things we may remember fondly that they really straightened us out when we needed it, or we remember that they would just not stop being all up in our grill about things. Either way, we remember them as a point of authority by and large. If we’re lucky, when we get a bit older we can befriend our parents and the relationship evens out into something that it should really resemble all along.

Remember that there was a time when your parents were everything to you, and you were everything to them. They took time out of their lives to have you, and reshaped everything they do as a result. For years, you are very literally incapable of surviving without them and your eventual separation from them into an independent life is at once their greatest triumph and tragedy.

I’m not going to make a sappy entreaty for you to pick up the phone and reach out and touch someone. Don’t forget that your parents have been here before. There was a time, really not that long ago, that they were you.