Friday night, after our weekly dinner with a handful of friends, The Wife™ and I stopped by the hospital to pay a visit to a friend who had just given birth to her first child and to drop off a small gift. After all, what doesn’t say “congratulations on the next phase of your life!” like a plush camel with over-sized hooves? What I wasn’t expecting was an unbelievably surreal experience bathed in fluorescent lights and floral nursing scrubs.

We stayed for a bit, talking to the parents, probing them for information on this totally foreign experience and cooing over the newborn who’s name at that point was Baby. I saw nothing wrong with this, but apparently they intended to choose another. I don’t see why, really. It seems rather explanatory and to-the-point. Anyway, after The Wife™ accidentally set off the Baby Thief Alarm, we eventually left to go home to our own baby, the one with four massive, village-wrecking paws. (Aside: were the rest of you aware that they really do have theft devices on babies?! Is this just a ‘Tucky thing? Because while I think it’s a great idea, having lo-jack on your child is a rather 1984ish notion…)

“How do you prepare yourself mentally for such a personal paradigm shift?”

On the drive home our conversation understandably turned to the concept of having children and to how seemingly foreign it still seems to us. I think I was more freaked out than these parents were. What the hell do you do when you leave the hospital and go home that first day? Do you just hang out, staring at each other? How do you know how many CCs to feed the kid? How do you know how much sleep is “too much sleep?” And did you know that it is apparently unacceptable behavior to put a kid in the dryer to muffle it’s crying? Even if you don’t turn it on? There’s all sorts of these no-nos that, unless they publish a manual, I’m sure to violate based on my own code of Seemed Good At The Time-isms and I Don’t See Why Nots.

While I have friends that are already parents, I have yet had the pleasure of witnessing them in the act of parenting. So for my purposes, they are all still the irresponsible teenagers I remember them to be and not the “take everything including the kitchen sink in the quilted diaperbag”-hauling bundle of nerves that they more likely are. How do you prepare yourself mentally for such a personal paradigm shift? I suppose you do have those nine months while the kid is baking in the oven to get your stuff together, but still. Who wakes up one day and says, “Yup, I’m ready to irrevocably alter the course of my life today by having a child!”? Do people do that? Otherwise how do they know that they’re ready to be parents, ready to make decisions such as “bourbon or gin: things to quiet my kid down.” I’m just not prepared to make that call. (But for the record, I believe bourbon would be the appropriate choice here.)

I don’t know. I guess when it happens it will just happen. Maybe I’m just taking the Russian roulette approach to kids, which in the long run will prove unfortunately poor in hindsight. But at least as of this morning, I had no epiphanies, no angels/fairies/gnomes telling me it was Minivan Time™. So I guess I’ll leave the kids to other people right now and hope that by the time it is Minivan Time™ I’ll know it. And that I’ll have finished installing the padding on the inside of the dryer. You know, just in case.