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Babies and the Laws of Physics Posting Date: Jan 13 2008 4:40PM Babies are sponges. They soak up information and experiences, learning like a Shop-Vac sucking sawdust. It’s a magical process to watch. With a newborn, you take a long shower and you miss a first smile or a head lift. Pay attention and you can actually see your four-week old daughter learning to use her eyes or starting to figure out that her hands might possibly, maybe, someday allow her to play video games and send text messages.
What nobody seems to mention, however, is that this magnificent learning process is governed by one of the least publicized laws of physics in the known universe. We all know about Newton’s apple and gravity. We have all heard of E=mc2 even if we haven’t memorized the constant speed of light. The dark secret of baby physics, however, is that knowledge, experiences and skills actually have mass and volume. They are as solid as your kitchen counter.
How do I know this? Because as those seemingly intangible things go into my child, a whole mess of other stuff comes hurtling out. The insides of a baby are pretty cramped quarters, so when something like the experience of grasping daddy’s finger or meeting a family member goes in, it pushes something else out the other side. If a baby is a learning machine, a baby is also an expulsion machine. There are things coming out of my child that, frankly, shock and awe me.
There are also things coming out of my child that I am absolutely certain never went in. She drinks nothing but milk, the little dickens, and manages to spit up cheese bits. She has never been within a hundred yards of a hotdog stand, but by some miracle, she fills her diaper with mustard at least ten times a day. And when I say mustard, I don’t mean just one kind. I’m talking about the full range of mustards from your fast food squeeze packet atomic yellow kind, all the way through to a sort of chunky Dijon that would go nicely with a sulphurized ham.
She also expels gas like a pinpricked balloon. I used to think that I had witnessed some of the country’s best farters in action. I really did. I’ve been caught in hotel rooms with golf buddies after crazy nights of beer, shrimp rings and jalapeno poppers. I’ve taken long bus rides with high school basketball teams. I have eaten bad hollandaise sauce. I thought I had been to the mountain top of flatulence. I was wrong.
My little ten-pound bundle of joy puts all of my past tooting experiences to shame. For resonance, assonance, vibration and duration, she is the champ. For velocity, amplitude and turbidity, there is no one like her. And for frequency, forget about it. My little girl is in a league of her own – one breath in, two farts out. It’s alchemy. Give her an ounce of gold, and she’ll make you four pounds of gas.
You might think that with all of this superstar attention on the glamorous expulsions, my little girl might be neglecting the fundamentals. No sir. Like a Gold Glove short stop, she makes not just the spectacular plays, but all the routine plays as well. She burps, she pees, she sneezes, she drools and yes, she makes boogers – both the dry crusty kind and the rubbery moist kind.
My wife and I spend a good portion of our day monitoring, detecting, wiping, washing and removing all traces of our daughter’s expulsions. We launder, we wipe-down, we rinse, we scrub, we disinfect and we encase toxic diapers in eco-tragic airtight plastic. This is how we bond with our daughter. I understand that there is a point in the future when this will stop and our daughter will become a child capable of limiting or managing most, if not all, of her own expulsions. This will be a glorious time.
Then, a few years after those golden days, she will hit puberty and become interested in boys and I know I will long desperately for the days of expulsion with all of my heart. |
