Tales from the Crib by Green Risa

Author:Green, Risa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN group
Published: 2010-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

fourteen

Two days later, I’m sitting on the floor in Susan’s class, surveying the room to see if any of the other babies have freakish physical deformities, or if mine is the only one. I think that mine is the only one. Some of the babies are completely bald, but that doesn’t really count. One has a colossal nose—we’re talking a serious beak—and one poor little girl is just downright ugly, but that’s not what I’m looking for, either.

No, I think, trying not to cry as I realize that all of the other babies are perfectly normal. There’s nobody else. Eleven perfectly normal, skinny little beanpoles with perfectly normal round bowling balls for heads, and one gigantic round bowling ball topped with the head of a tennis racket. God, I wonder if formula causes flathead syndrome, too.

I sigh. Ever since the appointment with Dr. Newman, I’ve been obsessed with fixing Parker’s head. I went out and bought a little pillow with a hole in the middle of it—it looks like the part of a massage table that you stick your face in, except that it’s for the back of her head, for when she’s lying on the floor—and I’ve instructed Deloris to try to keep her on her stomach as much as possible, even though she hates being on her stomach and screams bloody murder whenever I make her do “tummy time.”

But her sleeping is turning out to be a real problem. I’ve been putting her down on her side, like Dr. Newman said, but she always rolls onto her back within twenty seconds. The first night I kept running into her room every five minutes to push her back onto her side, but that’s obviously not a long-term solution. So I called Dr. Newman yesterday to tell him that it wasn’t working, and he recommended using crib wedges to keep her in place. So I ran out and bought two different kinds, but they don’t work either. She slides right over the damn things.

I swear, you have no idea how much this is stressing me out. I mean, how am I supposed to trust him that her head is going to get better if the solutions he’s giving me don’t work? Trust him, my ass. I wonder if Susan has any ideas. I think I’ll ask her at the end of class, during the Q & A time.

The lecture today is about language development, and Susan has provided us with a long list of books that we should be reading them at this age. I’m not really paying attention because I’m so consumed with comparing Parker’s head to everyone else’s, but I’m pretty sure I just heard her say that we should be reading to them for an hour a day. Which is absurd, by the way. I mean, I don’t know when the last time was that she tried reading a book to a three-month-old, but it’s pointless. I tried to read Pat the Bunny to Parker just last week, but all she wanted to do was gum the pages.

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