New dad Garrett feels like he lives in a zoo with a myriad of creatures, all in one body. One little, tiny, body.
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It is always popular to take animals and give them human personalities and characteristics. Take a look at the most recent, the hit movie Zootopia. However, in my year as a progressively less-clueless dad, I’ve done the opposite. I’ve watched my son, Oliver, and compared him to a true menagerie of animals. Here are some of the highlights.
- Tyrannosaurus Rex – Every parent has been there. The serenity of baby sleep has finally settled over the household. Silence reigns and peace rules the day. That is, until you realize that you need something from the baby’s room. You psyche yourself up. You channel past lives where you had some form of ninja training. Without a sound, you open the door, creep across the room and grab the cell phone you foolishly left behind. You turn back, the goal in sight. Then you hear a head turn and you feel the eyes of your baby upon you. Panic sets in. You freeze. Suddenly, your adorable baby turns into a metaphorical T-rex who will only be able to see you if you move. Standing totally still, you know there is nothing else you can do but wait to see if your freezing is a success or if the T-rex will stir and reign overtired chaos back upon the household.
- Hippo – Simple, because sometimes, the baby is hungry, hungry. I can’t be upset. He takes after me, for better or worse.
- Snapping Turtle – As many breastfeeding mothers can probably attest to more than me, just because a baby is toothless doesn’t mean there isn’t danger from those strong baby jaws. Then, as the first teeth pop through and they discover the deliciousness of real food, the danger only multiplies. The particular analogy of a snapping turtle arose when I held out a bite of food for my baby and I didn’t get my fingers out of the way fast enough. Lesson learned.
- Cat – Unfortunately, I’m not talking cute and cuddly kitten here. I’m talking about the kind of cat that sees things on a table and takes immense pleasure in knocking them down, especially if they are filled with stain inducing liquid. Sometime after he learned that he could pull himself up on a table, my son thought himself the reincarnation of Sir Isaac Newton and began theorizing about gravity. He experimented by knocking as many things off the table as possible. He also was a good scientist and repeated his experiment many times over, an avid follower of the Scientific Method. Our living room table quickly became very bare.
- Baby bird – To be fair, this analogy started as one I assigned to my wife and I. Parenting changes your perspective on many things very quickly. Before having a baby, the thought of partially masticating food to feed to another (i.e. “Mama-birding”) was one that seemed slightly disturbing. As a parent, I thought nothing of sharing delicious morsels of partially chewed food with my lovely child. Also, the open mouth and hungry noises only added to the baby bird analogy.
I’m only a year into parenting and the animal kingdom is vast. I’m sure I’ll find a reason to compare my baby to the rest of it as he hits toddler-dom.
Photo: Flickr/Ben Fitzgerald-Oconner