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Flustered Fred leads the charge to birth of grandbaby
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Sunday, May 11, 2008

Flustered Fred leads the charge to birth of grandbaby

My granddaughter Charlotte’s recent arrival has made me marvel that my own children managed to reach adulthood, deprived as they were of so much modern equipment and parental expertise.

They may not have even made it to the hospital delivery room if my husband, Fred, had been as scatterbrained in the 1970s as he was en route to Erlanger for baby Charlotte’s birth. For starters, he forgot camera, cell phone and sunglasses, which resulted in respective backtracking to house, parking garage and several previously visited locations. And I was so flustered that I actually let him drive.

We got to the hospital just in time to hand over the camera to the soon-to-be father, Joe, and for Fred to gobble a supper of crumbled animal crackers, a mangled meal he described as “vendingmachine kill.” When a tour

group of pregnant women popped in to peruse the family waiting room, he told them he himself was having a baby girl, even as he spoke.

For me, the most difficult part of the hospital drill was removing my wedding ring to gain metal-free admission to the newborn intensive care unit. I greased my knobby, gnarled knuckle with soap, lip gloss and saliva until it grudgingly released the ring. A week later, my finger still looked like a swollen sausage link, bisected by a suspicious dent where a casing string perhaps hid below fat folds of flesh. I wore my wedding band on a chain around my neck as though Fred and I

were going steady in our geriatric years.

But I really showed my age when I asked my daughter-in-law, Nicole, about her postpartum peritoneal care. As a college nursing student in the ’60s, I’d had to set up what looked like tanningbed lights, mounted on plywood slabs, between the splayed legs of hospital obstetric patients. Tented under a bed sheet, the heat lamps supposedly helped heal a new mother’s stitches. Nicole snickered as she noted that catgut sutures had bowed to adhesive incision-closing strips around the time leeches lost favor in the medical arsenal.

While the new little love triangle stayed in the hospital a few extra days, Fred and I busied ourselves with assembling gear for a newborn nursery that hadn’t been completed before Charlotte’s early arrival. The glider rocker, three-in-one playpen and saucer-scooter represented just the tip of the infant-apparatus iceberg that was all new to us. But other stuff we’d thought was standard, like blankets and bumper pads, had become verboten, we learned, as potential crib-death culprits.

Instead of snuggling under afghans and comforters, our grandchild gets swaddled mummy-like below the neck, and we only catch cursory glimpses of “Burrito Baby’s” arms and legs. In lieu of the over-the-shoulder burping style we practiced decades ago, she’s propped into a seating position and pounded as though she were a ketchup bottle perched on a picnic table.

Plainly, bringing up baby 2008 is a brave new world to a pair of debuting grandparents who were Dr. Spock groupies before “Star Trek” made Leonard Nimoy a household name. But Fred and I are trainable, and so far Joe and Nicole have been generous and patient in their baby-care coaching.

Already, Fred and I have been permitted to change one diaper, administer 2 ounces of fluid and to hold Charlotte without a safety net’s being stretched below. We may even work up to babysitting privileges once we understand that, in the nursery lexicon at least, a PDF has less to do with computers than something called Parent Directed Feeding.

E-mail Jan Galletta at jangalletta@yahoo.com