Parenthood welcomes you like one giant, exhilarating, stupendous punch in the face. On December 20th at 08:42 we joined the ranks of parents. In just a few moments an entire piece of our identity changed when we welcomed Daxon Reid Price into the world. Despite the lack of sleep, we’re bonding with the little human. We like him and we like this suitcase picture of our wee man – he really has no idea how indicative of his life it will be.

Being breech Daxon was slated to arrive on December 21st but the hospital bumped back our appointment and then our protest got us moved forward a day (to be exact, between the moment we hung up the phone and the moment we entered the hospital was 17 hours). He arrived 42 minutes behind the new scheduled time because the pediatrician hit traffic. We felt it fit the pattern of our lives: well-planned with an unforeseen, last-minute twist.

The learning curve with a child is steep and here are some of our insights to date:

• sleep deprivation can be an effective means of obtaining information / torture. We do however question the accuracy of this method seeing as after our first 52 hours running on 4 hours of non-consecutive sleep we were pretty much ready to confess to anything for just a moment’s rest (“YES! We admit it – we sunk the Titanic”, “OK, fine! McDonald’s secret sauce is actually just mayo” or “it was us, in the library with the wrench”).
• newborns are cutest when sleeping.
• everything counts as multitasking since you are now parenting while doing everything else in life that you did before (envision us typing this with a baby in one hand and the other hand working the keyboard)
• meconium: not as bad as everyone made it out to be. Don’t get us wrong; it’s still gross. If you don’t know what this is, savour your ignorance and don’t look it up until you need to.
• gas = a baby’s arch nemesis. burping = a baby’s superhero.
• there is no greater calm than the stillness that follows a baby’s crying.
• you will get peed on, pooped on and puked on (sometimes all on the same, unfortunate day).
• never underestimate the distance a baby can project bodily fluids (or quasi-solids).
• as the last 2 points demonstrate, you do end up talking about baby poop despite the fact that you swore you wouldn’t be those parents.
• some people think all babies are cute. We disagree. Some babies are cute, others have cute clothes. Ours is cute (and has cute clothes).
• humans are wired to think small things are cute so that we think our offspring are cute so we don’t put them on the back porch while screaming at 3am for the third night in a row.