Traveling with Baby
By now you’re probably thinking how nice it would be to take a trip somewhere and stay in a place where there isn’t a hardened yellowish glaze consisting of bananas mixed with baby spit smeared on every surface below a height of two feet. Great idea! My wife and I took many trips with our son, Robert, when he was less than a year old, and we found them all to be surprisingly carefree experiences right up until approximately four hours after we left home, which is when his temperature would reach 106 degrees Fahrenheit. Often we didn’t even have to take his temperature, because we could see that his pacifier was melting.
Almost all babies contain a virus that activates itself automatically when the baby is 200 miles or more from its pediatrician. The first time this happened to Robert, we wound up in a pediatric clinic where the doctor got his degree from the University of Kuala Lumpur Medical School and Textile College. He said, “Baby very hot! Bad hot! Could have seezhah!” And we said, “Oh no! My God! Not seezhah!” Then we said, “What the hell is ‘seezhah’?” We were afraid it was some kind of horrible Asian disease. Then the doctor rolled his eyes back in his head and went, “Aaaarrgh,” and we said, “Oh! Seizure!”
The lesson to be learned from this is that when you travel with a baby, you must be prepared for emergencies. Let’s say you’re planning a trip to the seashore. Besides baby’s usual food, formula, bottles, sterilizer, medicine, clothing, diapers, reams of moist towelettes, ointments, lotions, powders, pacifier, toys, portable crib, blankets, rectal thermometer, car seat, stroller, backpack, playpen, and walker, don’t forget to take:
* One of those things that look like miniature turkey basters that you use to clear out babies’ noses, for when your baby develops a major travel cold and sounds like a little cauldron of mucus gurgling away in the motel room six feet away from you all night long.
* A potent infant-formula anti-cholera drug, for when you’re lying on the beach and look up to discover that baby has become intimately involved with an enormous buried dog dropping.
* Something to read while you’re sitting in the emergency ward waiting room.
* Plenty of film, so you can record these and the many other hilarious adventures you’re bound to have traveling with a baby. You might also take a camera.
Taking a Baby on an Airplane
First, you should notify the airline in advance that you will be traveling with an infant, so they can use their computers to assign you a seat where your baby will be in a position to knock a Bloody Mary into the lap of a corporate executive on his way to make an important speech. Also, you should be aware that your baby will insist on standing up in your lap all the way through the flight, no matter how long it is. If you plan to fly with a baby to Japan, all I can say is you’d better have thighs of steel.
Some people try to get their babies to sit down on flights, by giving them sedatives. On our doctor’s suggestion, we tried this on a cross-country flight, and all it did was make Robert cranky. The only thing that cheered him up was to grab the hair of the man sitting in front of us, who tried to be nice about it, but if you have a nine-month-old child with a melted Hershey bar all over his pudgy little fingers grabbing your hair all the way from sea to shining sea, you’d start to get a little cranky yourself. So I think it might be a good idea if, on flights featuring babies, the airline distributed sedatives to all the adults, except maybe the pilot.
Teething
Teething usually begins on March 11 at 3:25 P.M., although some babies are off by as much as 20 minutes. The major symptom of teething is that your baby becomes irritable and cries a lot. Of course, this is also the major symptom of everything else, so you might try the old teething test, which is to stick your finger in baby’s mouth and see whether baby bites all the way through to your bone, indicating the presence of teeth.
Most teething babies want to chew on something, so it’s a good idea to keep a plastic teething ring in the freezer, taking care not to confuse it with the frozen horrible things from bus station rest rooms (see above).
The first teeth to appear will be the central divisors, followed by the bovines, the colons, the insights, and the Four Tops, for a total of 30 or 40
in all. Your pediatrician will advise you to brush and floss your baby’s teeth daily, but he’s just kidding.
Quick-Reference Baby Medical-Emergency Chart
SYMPTOM CAUSE TREATMENT Baby is chewing contentedly Baby has found something horrible on floor Follow enticement procedure described on page 61
Baby is crying It could be teething, colic, snake bite, some kind of awful rare disease or something Don’t worry: most likely it’s nothing Baby has strange dark lines all over face and body Baby has gotten hold of laundry marking pen Wait for baby to grow new skin Baby’s voice sounds muffled Baby’s two-year-old sibling, jealous of all the attention the New Arrival is getting, has covered the New Arrival with dirt Vacuum baby quickly; explain to sibling that you love him or her just as much as baby, but you will kill him or her if he or she ever does that again
Chapter 10. The Second Year
Major Developments during the Second Year
Your baby will learn to walk and talk, but that’s nothing. The major development is that your baby will learn how to scream for no good reason in shopping malls.
What to Do when a One-Year-Old Starts Screaming in a Shopping Mall, and the Reason Is That You Won’t Let It Eat the Pizza Crust That Somebody, Who Was Probably Diseased, Left in the Public Ashtray amid the Sand and the Saliva-Soaked Cigar Butts, but the Other Shoppers Are Staring at You as if to Suggest That You Must Be Some Kind of Heartless Child-Abusing Nazi Scum
First of all, forget about reason. You can’t reason with a one-year-old. In fact, reasoning with children of any age has been greatly overrated. There is no documented case of any child being successfully reasoned with before the second year of graduate school.
Also you can’t hit a one-year-old. It will just cry harder, and women the age of your mother will walk right up and whap you with their handbags. So what do you do when your child decides to scream in public? Here are several practical, time-tested techniques:
Explain your side to the other shoppers. As they go by, pull them aside, show them the pizza crust, and talk it over with them, adult to adult (“Look! The little cretin wants to eat this! Ha ha! Isn’t that CRAZY?”).
Threaten to take your child to see Santa Claus if it doesn’t shut up. All children are born with an instinctive terror of Santa Claus.