There are times like last night that make me wonder why it is that babies aren't born with the ability to communicate. Maybe someday there will be some DNA mutation that will give a baby the ability to talk when born or even soon after, and that will be a mutation that sticks as that baby's survival probability will shoot through the roof. When a fever comes along the talking baby can say "excuse me Mother, but I am feeling a little hot" or when put to bed face-down it can say "research dictates sleeping on my back will decrease my chance of SIDS." For now, though, we have these babies that only communicate by difficult-to-diagnose crying (well, if you spend $170 dollars you can buy the "Why Cry Baby Crying Analyzer" here, which is unfortunately out of stock preventing us from having a "device [that] illuminates one of five crying ‘expressions’ telling you whether the child is hungry, bored, tired, stressed or annoyed"---it truly must be heartbreaking to be trying to get your baby to smile, have him start to cry, and have the "Why Cry Baby" report that your child is either bored with or annoyed by you), and last night we had a real tearful one on our hands. We tried all of the tricks, but nothing would work. Emmett would sleep for 5 minutes then wake up, jerking all about and screaming like mad. I kept putting warm clothes and shoes on to take him for a walk and he would decide to fall asleep. I would undress, get ready for bed, and he would be at it again. Finally at midnight I had had enough and decided to take him for a walk no matter what. I kid you not, Emmett was fast asleep before I was halfway down our front steps. I pushed him around for 10 blocks or so trying to decide if I should walk to the Safeway on Mission, the nearest 24-hour store that might have a replacement battery for the thermometer---what happened to good old-fashioned mercury thermometers---and there wasn't a stir, so I returned home. He had been in the bassinet of the stroller for the walk so I just disconnected the bassinet and left him in it so as not to chance a disturbance that would wake him. Next thing I knew it was 6:30am (woken by the alarm clock for once---how novel) and Emmett was still snoozing. He ended up going for a full 6.5ish hours by himself on the floor shattering his previous non-human contact sleep record by a full 2 hours or so. What happened last night to make him so cranky and to then make him sleep so soundly I have no idea, and unless the "Why Cry Baby Crying Analyzer" comes back in stock soon we will not know in the future either.
Monday, April 21, 2008
What does this baby want?
There are times like last night that make me wonder why it is that babies aren't born with the ability to communicate. Maybe someday there will be some DNA mutation that will give a baby the ability to talk when born or even soon after, and that will be a mutation that sticks as that baby's survival probability will shoot through the roof. When a fever comes along the talking baby can say "excuse me Mother, but I am feeling a little hot" or when put to bed face-down it can say "research dictates sleeping on my back will decrease my chance of SIDS." For now, though, we have these babies that only communicate by difficult-to-diagnose crying (well, if you spend $170 dollars you can buy the "Why Cry Baby Crying Analyzer" here, which is unfortunately out of stock preventing us from having a "device [that] illuminates one of five crying ‘expressions’ telling you whether the child is hungry, bored, tired, stressed or annoyed"---it truly must be heartbreaking to be trying to get your baby to smile, have him start to cry, and have the "Why Cry Baby" report that your child is either bored with or annoyed by you), and last night we had a real tearful one on our hands. We tried all of the tricks, but nothing would work. Emmett would sleep for 5 minutes then wake up, jerking all about and screaming like mad. I kept putting warm clothes and shoes on to take him for a walk and he would decide to fall asleep. I would undress, get ready for bed, and he would be at it again. Finally at midnight I had had enough and decided to take him for a walk no matter what. I kid you not, Emmett was fast asleep before I was halfway down our front steps. I pushed him around for 10 blocks or so trying to decide if I should walk to the Safeway on Mission, the nearest 24-hour store that might have a replacement battery for the thermometer---what happened to good old-fashioned mercury thermometers---and there wasn't a stir, so I returned home. He had been in the bassinet of the stroller for the walk so I just disconnected the bassinet and left him in it so as not to chance a disturbance that would wake him. Next thing I knew it was 6:30am (woken by the alarm clock for once---how novel) and Emmett was still snoozing. He ended up going for a full 6.5ish hours by himself on the floor shattering his previous non-human contact sleep record by a full 2 hours or so. What happened last night to make him so cranky and to then make him sleep so soundly I have no idea, and unless the "Why Cry Baby Crying Analyzer" comes back in stock soon we will not know in the future either.
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2 comments:
i'm curious to know if you think this gadget would really work. it's hard to tell from your entry. i saw this lady on oprah who claims she can interpret babytalk. you should give her a call.
I would be curious to see it in action, but I have my doubts. Emmett, for example, cries almost exclusively as a result of his being hungry (or at least feeding solves the cry), so we had a device that each and every time reported "hungry" as the reason he was crying it would probably at least match the 95% accuracy that the device advertises. The other main reason seems to be his being over-tired. I talked with a co-worker with 5 kids who said that the overwhelming majority of his kids' crying was hunger, diaper, or gas and I don't even know how the device would categorize the last two.
I had heard about the person on Oprah and wish I would have seen (maybe youtube has it). It seems like there is not that much that is usually wrong with an infant, so the vast majority of times you check the top three or four things and you are probably going to catch it. Was the woman on Oprah able to get it right every time with each child on first guess?
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