The first 48 hours

I took my two year old son to the zoo the other day and I read an interesting caption in front of the giraffe habitat. Apparently, in only a matter of hours, the baby giraffes are able to walk on their own. I suppose, somewhere in the evolutionary history, too many baby giraffes were getting left behind.  Either that or they were slowing down the parents a little too much.

This is not the case with humans. It's been a little over 48 hours since our second son was born, and I think he's still several months away from walking. Right now he's laying on my chest squeaking in an extremely cute fashion. Other than that, his skills range from suckling something fierce to sleeping in broad daylight.

That's not to say I don't have the most profound respect for this little guy.  He's quite the trooper, as all babies are. Imagine it this way, you just spent nine months in a climate controlled, gravity free environment, with food literally handed to you through a tube. All of a sudden, you find yourself being squeezed like a container of toothpaste, head first, down a canal that requires your skull to malform. It's got to be, by far, the worst headache ever. Your eyes, which have never experienced anything beyond almost total darkness, meet two glaring lights in the birthing room. Your lungs go from breathing water to breathing air in an instant and your nutrition is literally cut off from you. Bloody, cold and crying, you are poked with a needle and get cream rubbed in your still adjusting eyes. It's supposed to prevent blindness, the first of all great ironies. The one advantage is that you can move around a bit more.

Things get a little bit more familiar as you are placed next to the familiar heartbeat of your mother and given the opportunity to suck for your food. A new concept but something you've at least practiced. She is warm and you soon fall back asleep.

Except in the next several hours, you keep getting pulled away from her, and you keep getting poked. The worst comes a day afterwards, when they make the place where you pee hurt real bad.

Close to two days after you make this weird passage through the rabbit hole (no offense intended ladies, just a literary reference), you are strapped tight in a weird contraption and whisked off.

After so much pain and stress, it's no wonder we are programmed to not remember anything.