Caring for a newborn baby is kind of like caring for a bag full of beef jerky, except the beef jerky is slightly more aware of your existence.
For the first couple of weeks newborn babies generally do the following in no particular order:
1. Cry.
2. Eat.
3. Poop.
4. Trick you into thinking they are sleeping, but the minute you close your own eyes they want to do one of the previous three items.
This roast chicken reacts to your presence a little more than your newborn baby…and is slightly better tasting.
After several weeks of taking care of a baby who doesn’t really know you from the light switch you begin to get a little bored with the whole cry/poop/eat thing and begin to look forward to the days when baby is more “fun” and can do important things like smile or, the holiest of holy grails, sleep for four hours straight.
This leads to games you invent to play with your baby. Just because your baby is not much more than a cute and cuddly human-shaped pork roast doesn’t mean you can’t have all sorts of fun with the little bugger. Here are a few games my wife and I have invented over the past few sleep deprived weeks:
Baby Diaper Roulette: You and your partner take turns changing baby’s diaper, hoping and praying for a “wet” one instead of an “explosive poo” one. Ideally, you and your partner can trade bargains for changing a diaper. So, if I think the baby’s butt has exploded I can tell my wife, “Dear, I’ll do the dishes for a week if you change this next diaper.” If she agrees and there’s a poop in the diaper, then I win. Sure, I’ll have to do dishes for a week, but trust me, I still win. An alternative version of this game requires you to record who gets “shot” with the most poopy diapers each day and the person with the higher score gets to sleep in the car all night where it’s nice and peaceful.
Avoid the Fire Hose: Played with little boys. You can probably figure this one out. Wearing a raincoat while changing diapers is cheating.
Sleeping Baby Bomb: You rock the baby to sleep in your arms and then try to place the baby into his crib and sneak out of his room without disturbing him. This is much, much harder than it sounds. The teeniest false move or squeaky floorboard could cause baby to “explode” in a scream of dissatisfaction that will cost you another 30 minutes of rocking baby back to sleep.
Baby Coffee in a rousing game of Baby Prop.
Sleep Four Hours in a Row: This is a fantasy game where you imagine you can get a sane amount of sleep. It is, of course, completely impossible to do with a newborn.
Baby Prop: In this game you simply use the baby as an inanimate object for wacky photos and video clips. This includes dressing baby is silly costumes, putting silly things in baby’s hands and placing baby in inappropriate places such as carved out pumpkins, golf bags and microwaves.
All the top pediatricians agree that playing games with your baby is very important to his or her mental and social development. Of course, those same top pediatricians would immediately and urgently retract that statement if they ever read this blog.
2 Responses to “Games You Can Play With A Newborn Baby”
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thordora says:
He’s so freaking cute.
You will sleep again. just not for a very long time.
And you could always avoid diaper changes with the tool my husband used ‘I don’t smell anything….”
October 19th, 2006 at 10:02 am -
Da Mama says:
I prefer to hang mine in the most intrusive place and try to get past without getting grabbed.