I felt prepared for the birth of our son, but then he arrived

We’d read plenty of parenting books and brought damn near every object we owned to the hospital. Surely we were ready...

For all our fear and trepidation, on the eve of our child’s birth my wife and I felt prepared. We’d done our homework. A quick glance at the books piled by our bedside would have revealed us to be noted authorities on parenting. She’d read dozens of tomes with brush script-fonted titles such as Fabulous Baby Yes for You, the kind that dispenses highly judgmental guidelines on precisely what weight your child’s elbows should be, every nine minutes of its life. Being a man, I was left with more masculine fare, books that interspersed calming pictures of speedboats and rugby with easily digestible reminders that I was not, under any circumstances, to eat the baby.

We were prepared. We downloaded apps that used cutting-edge scientific formulae to compare our unborn child to different fruits or vegetables each week. We even switched to locally made apps when American veg names like zucchini and eggplant began to annoy.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Mkd28z