So we’ve been with Yash and Zubin, our two sons for about 2 weeks now. 4 days in the hospital and 10 days at home. When Zubin arrived, we kept the grandparental intervention to a minimum in the early goings. We had a dual interest of reducing the Grand Central Station-ish ness of our just over 800 square feet and also to try and test our readiness. We tried the same deal with the incoming recruit this time. We figured that our experience with the first will give us the necessary processes, insight and efficiency to offset the increased workload. In the world of business and economics, which I vaguely remember having something to do with, this is called economies of scale.

Last night during a pivotal moment that illustrates the experience of this week extremely nicely, I thought of my over-trained microeconomics professor. Let me relate:

During the day, we noticed that our newly arrived bundle of recombined DNA was producing a disproportionately large volume of flatulence. He had the farts. Big time. As Yash’s biological father, I can rationally deduce from the volume and hopeless timbre of his wail that this must generate discomfort at a level somewhere between being crushed by that car smashing junkyard machine and passing a kidney stone the size of say a peanut. My C-Section superhero wife, who’s super power is apparently a Wolverine-like 1 day healing from abdominal surgery, did the requisite web search and pulled up some advice about bending the baby’s knees like a personal trainer would stretch your glutes.

In the evening when I was on shift, I put Zubin down by reading the “only five!” books that he negotiated during dinner. Then I went over to Yash and fed him a bottle and read the web while he exercised his neck muscles. I put him down for a bit and dozed off on the couch, to be awoken 30 minutes later by wailing. I pulled him out the cradle and started doing the bounce-walk, but he just raised the volume. I tried giving him some more feed, no dice. 20 more minutes of bouncing, attempted feeding, talking, singing did not a bit of good. Then I felt the familiar warmth of diaper silica expanding on his bottom. I put him down to change the diaper. He yelped like a scared cat and continued wailing. Ah! This must be the flatulence! I took a look at him and he did look like he was straining and decided to give him a hand with the leg stretch. It definitely helped Yash generate more power as he beared down, because if my face had not been there to stop the flight, the entire room would have been coated.

That’s when I thought of economies of scale and how idiotic I must have sounded describing a second child by these principles.

Amazingly, I just sat there for a moment, because like a real man, my son took a big shit and fell asleep on the toilet. Which in this case happened to be his dad.

“Holy crap”.