Debugging Baby

Pacifier, Baby Bjorn, Beer. Only one of these is working.
Pacifier, Baby Bjorn, Beer. Only one of these is working.

Debugging babies is tough. Sometimes impossible. They are not little machines with logical rules and known workarounds. You can’t just turn them off and on again when all else fails. And ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away. Empirical testing doesn’t work either… try thing A, record result. Thing B, record result. Thing C. And on and on. Sure… there are the 5 S’s you want to do (shushing, swaying, swaddling, sucking, side/stomach)… And the other S’s you want to avoid (shitting, spraying [pee]) and more S’s you want to try (satiation [food], single-malt [whiskey])… But after you’ve covered those bases, where do you go? Back to the beginning to do it all over again, of course.

But by the time you’ve gone through each one of these procedures to debug whatever is wrong with your little nugget several, several times… And something miraculously WORKED (by the grace of whatever is holy WORKED!) you’re left not truely knowing what it is you did that actually soothed the lil monster into sleep (or, at least, silence). Maybe it was a magical combination of witchcraft? Maybe it was just time?

Only one thing is really certain, and that is that it’s not repeatable. And that’s the worst kind of bug in the system – the kind that is different every time.

 

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