How?How?How?

As our lives hurtle forward to the much anticipated arrival of our little one, we've decided to try to blog. We know that we're far from many of our family & friends and we hope that this might be one way of keeping in touch & sharing our changing lives with them. Hopefully you'll hear from both of us, individually & together, and hopefully we'll hear from you.

This evening we sat in a room full of soon-to-be, first time parents. We attended a short lecture given by a pediatrician at one of the local hospitals. He talked for more than an hour about breast feeding & bottle feeding, physiological jaundice, gestational diabetes, how to trim baby finger nails, how not to take advice from other people, and what felt like a gazillion other topics that we've not even begun to think about. At times it seemed like so much to think about. At other times, we looked around the room & thought, we must be more prepared than lots of these people. I'm guessing though, we'll never really be ready.

A flurry of note taking went on through the session. Though, I sat with my arms folded and listened intently. Traci sat, pen poised for note taking, and wrote very little. Are we more retentive than all the other parents there? Or, are we just more laid back? Somehow I doubt either is true. I also doubt that writing anything down would've done much good. In 4 months when our baby is whaling at the top of her little lungs, it's unlikely that we'd run to our notes. But, what will we do? How will we know? This is the worry. Everyone says, "you will know." But, how? How?How?How?

We were struck by the pediatrician's discussion of cutting baby finger nails. He suggested that using so-called baby finger nail clippers will inevitably lead to bloody fingers & toes. He suggested using manicure scissors, but that's not the point. The point is that, in a very casual out-of-the way manner, he said don't put a band-aid on those bloody, baby fingers. Baby'll chew her fingers & can choke on the band-aid. "Wow," we both seemed to have thought. How would we have ever thought of that? And, of course, it's not just band-aids but a hundred other things that we've not yet discovered. How will our poor baby not choke on our sheer ignorance? How?How?How?