Wednesday, November 11, 2009

When Life Imitates TV

Dr. Husband and I finally got around to watching the Happiest Baby on the Block video, at the urging of every person with children we’ve ever met. Which leads me to wonder, if every parent in America is following Dr. Karp’s famed baby-calming techniques, then every baby in America is the happiest baby on their block, and how is that possible? I mean, statistically speaking?

We’d been putting off watching partly because the prospect of watching a bunch babies scream seemed like an aggravating—and overly foreshadowy—way to spend an evening and partly because I’d read on the back of the box that the DVD was 128 minutes long. Two hours of screaming babies getting swaddled and shushed and held on their side and swung and given pacifiers to suck on? Thankfully it was some kind of typo—or maybe there are some really long bonus features on the DVD or something because the main feature was more like 28 minutes long—long enough to make us feel like we have a fighting chance at successful swaddling and not so long that we were driven to drink. (Well, at least not more than a few sips.)

As regards the swaddling, Dr. Husband said, “They really do become burritos, don’t they?”

Yes, they do. So much so that when I was standing in line today at a Mexican fast-food chain watching the employees make other peoples’ lunches as I waited to order mine, I kept thinking, “Wow, those burritos are like little swaddled babies, aren’t they?”

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