A Walking Pharmacy

So on Friday, July 11th Shae and I attended our first baby class: "Baby Care Basics". I've been busy for the past week, but I finally had time to share our experience, so here you go.

We walked into the classroom and saw three tables in a "U" with about seven dolls spread over them. There was one couple already there, so Shae found the cutest available doll and we took our seat. I started messing around with the doll and the teacher came back into the room and told us that we would be treating the dolls like they were real babies. Of course, as she said this I was holding ours upside down by one leg. Good thing they don't give us grades. I thought I was going to get off easy and have Shae do all the work until we mentioned we were the ones having twins and the teacher gave us another baby. There goes that plan.

Rather than recap the whole class, here are some highlights:

• All but one of the other couples due dates' were in August, most of them in the first half of the month. The other couple was due in November (another set of twins). Shae's baby-belly was as big or bigger than all the other moms-to-be. I can't even imagine what she's going to be like in another month or two. She is not going to be a happy prego.
  
• The guy next to us dropped his baby. He tried to play it off, and I don't know if anyone else noticed, but he dropped his little boy while changing his diaper. At least I didn't drop my doll.
• Our teacher was a Certified Lactation Expert (or something like that). Let's just say that she was...umm...built for the job.
  
• Shae is about to turn into a walking pharmacy. Apparently breast milk is some sort of super-drug. We were told that her breast milk will cure all kinds of problems not just on our babies, but on us too. Cuts, zits, eye infections, etc. Just a squirt of boob-juice will fix them right up. That may be true, but if I get an eye infection I'll get some drops rather than let my wife squirt the super-juice in my eye. Yuck.
• Newborns go through about 10-12 diapers a day. That's 24 diapers a day, or 168 a week. Holy crap! I need to go buy some stock in Pampers. This is going to suck.
• A quote from the "coursebook":

  Breasts: Both male and female babies can have swollen breasts. They may even leak milk from their nipples. This is due to maternal hormones that have filtered through to the baby in utero. Do not try to express milk from your baby's nipples. The swelling will disappear withing a week or two.

To recap what I learned: babies are gross. They're hairy, they pee all over the place, they crap out some sort of tar for the first couple of days, and they come out of the hoo-ha with coneheads. Tar crapping, pee spraying, hairy coneheads. This is going to be awesome.

"I wonder if the babies fart in their amniotic fluid. Do you think it bubbles?" --Shizzle