The Early Shift: Father’s Day

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who has heretofore been referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.

This is the last entry in the Early Shift. Starting today, I’m back on paternity leave for four more weeks, so I’ll see you in September. Thank you for reading and for all of your lovely, supportive comments.

June 21
At 3:40 AM, Derek Jr. awakes, screaming. It is Father’s Day.

I’m going to have to stop keeping this journal. I hope I can jump back in with updates from time to time, but I haven’t been able to keep up since I returned to work. I can’t seem to get more than a few sentences down before something more pressing forces me to stop or before I exhaust my meager supply of focus. I wrote so many of these entries in the early hours of the morning, and I can’t keep doing that when I’ve got to get up just a few hours later and do good writing. I’m not sure how many of those previous entries were substantive enough to get published, so let me tell you what you may have missed over the past month or so.

Derek Jr. is 12 weeks old. She is healthy. She is enormous. Like all the babies in both my family and my wife’s, she has big, chunky cheeks. When she’s been outside napping in the stroller for an hour or two, they get so rosy that it feels like Mike Elias will pop up any second to inform us that she’s been drafted by the Orioles. Even if she weren’t enormous, though, she’d still seem enormous to us. One thing I’ve learned about babies is that they always feel so heavy. They’re always growing, which means every single time you pick them up, they’re a little bit heavier than they were the last time, which means you’re always, every day of their lives, surprised by how heavy they are.

Derek Jr. is happy. She is such a happy baby. She smiles at us all day long. She laughs. She wants to play. Honestly, it’s a problem sometimes. It’s hard to put her down to sleep, because as I rock her, she’s looking up at me and smiling. Just seeing my face gets her too excited to sleep. Not that this means I’m special. Once I do get her to sleep, she’ll wake up 30 minutes later and stay awake because she’s too busy smiling up at her friend the ceiling fan.

Even this morning, she was very upset as I started to change her very wet overnight diaper, but it didn’t last. The list of things upsetting her in that moment was long. She was hungry. She was tired. She was gassy. Her diaper was wet. She was on her back, which made those last two line items even more uncomfortable. That was more than enough to make her moan and squirm on the changing table. Because she was still sleepy, wasn’t really opening her eyes, but as soon as she did, as soon as she saw my face, the list went out the window. She smiled and relaxed.

I keep my cracked old classical guitar on a hook above the changing table, and I’ve started doing a new thing where every time I finish changing Derek Jr.’s diaper, before I pick her up, I pluck a string and then sing the same note that the string made. It doesn’t always do much for her, but maybe a third of the time, she thinks it’s the neatest thing in the world.

Derek Jr. is also a talker. She has started babbling. It is so fun. I’m really trying to encourage her to keep it up. Whenever she makes a sound, I’ll smile and laugh and make the same sound back to her. She understands the game; she’ll smile and make another sound. Sometimes we can keep up these smiley, wordless conversations for minutes.

Derek Jr. is far too young to be able to sit up, but we found that she can manage it for a while if we plop her into the middle of my wife’s C-shaped breastfeeding pillow. She looks like she’s in a tiny hot tub, leaning back against the middle part of the C with her feet sticking out the open side. It’s a more comfortable position, and it allows us to sit on the couch in front of her and find new ways to make her smile and laugh. We’ve been doing this for long enough that as soon as she finds herself in the hot tub, she lights up. She knows its playtime.

I’ve been playing the guitar for Derek Jr. since the day we took her home from the hospital. In fact, I did so before we even took her out of the car seat, but I’ve known all along that it was too early for her to be able to process it. But that has just started changing. Derek Jr. is just, just starting to respond to music, so now I can plop her in the hot tub and play the guitar for her. Chords are too much for her, but she’s intrigued by finger-picking. She goes back and forth between watching my left hand making the chord shapes and my right hand plucking the strings. She likes it when I sing. She likes it when a song has a sudden stop and I ad-lib a fun noise. I’m choosing to take it as an encouraging sign that she’ll follow in my footsteps as a punk rock fan.

I’ve known for a while now that I need to write a song for her. I’m sure I’ll write more than one over time, but the first one matters. I’ve written a song for each of my nieces and nephews. It’s a special thing in my family. Some of them are sweet little children’s songs like you’d expect:

But I’ve got seven nieces and nephews, and the songs have varied quite a bit. The day my nephew Theo was born, I wrote a Ramonesy rocker about his status as a can’t-miss prospect who just got called up to The Show. I started writing for Baseball Prospectus just a few months later, so this may qualify as my first piece of baseball writing:

It felt like a lot more pressure to write a song for my own daughter. I didn’t know where to start, but then, two days ago, I was playing for Derek Jr., and this thing that I say to her all the time just popped out of my mouth with a fully formed melody. “I love you every day.” I say it to her when she first wakes up. God knows when I’ll have time to flesh out the rest of the song and actually record it, but that’ll be the chorus, “I love you every day.”

Things will not always be this idyllic. One day my wife and I will not be Derek Jr.’s only friends. (That’s my wife’s impression of Derek Jr. when we she wakes up, sees our faces, and breaks into a smile: “Look, it’s my only friends!”) One day she’ll be a terrible two. One day she’ll be a middle schooler who’s mortified by everything we do and half the things we don’t do. Last night, my wife and I took turns pitching reasons Derek Jr. will get mad at us when she’s a brash Brooklyn teenager in the early 2040s. Please make your line readings extremely heavy on the vocal fry:

• “I need a new hoverphone. I hate you.”
• “Oh my God, Derek B. is allowed to have sleepovers on weeknights.” (Oh, I should mention that because every new baby in our neighborhood seems to have the same first name as Derek Jr., in this game, all of her friends are differentiated by their last initials.)
• “Everybody else has a teleportation portal. I hate you.”
• “Derek J.’s parents let her get her ears pierced when she was three. And other Derek J. got a cybernetic brain implant when she was seven.”
• “What’s water? I hate you.”

Derek Jr.’s sleep has regressed some, which can be really frustrating. We’re lucky to have her down to bed by eight o’clock most nights, and nine is not uncommon. She was, for a short while, making it through the night without needing to eat, which really set her up for a good day. She had meals at 7:00, 11:00, 3:00, and 7:00, with good naps in between and then a long stretch of sleep at night. But she’s back to waking up hungry in the night, often around 4:00 or 5:00, which ruins the seven o’clock meal, which throws the whole day out of whack. My wife wants to see if breastfeeding her in the early morning rather than bottle feeding will be less ruinous, so even though it’s 3:40 AM and her shift hasn’t started yet, I wake her as gently as I can.

She feeds Derek Jr., and instead of going to bed, I head over to the kitchen. I noiselessly empty the dishwasher. I fill the kettle and set everything up for my wife’s morning coffee. I empty the bottle sterilizer and load it with clean water and a detergent tablet. “This will set us up for a good day,” I tell myself, recognizing in the moment that it’s the most dad thought I’ve ever had. “Heel Turn 2,” by the Mountain Goats, is playing in my head. “Get stomped like a snake,” go the lyrics. “Lie down in the dirt.”

It’s later in the day now. Father’s Day is over. My wife wanted to make a big deal for my first Father’s Day. Mother’s Day was really important to her, so we acted accordingly. I got her gifts and flowers. We went to brunch. Matching outfits were involved. I wrote a card not from myself, but from Derek Jr., and since we were already pretending she could read and write, I went for it and made her sound as erudite as I could. I laid it on thick with the flowery language and vocabulary words. A few sentences in, my wife looked up from the card and asked, “Why is our daughter British?”

I didn’t want all that. Father’s Day isn’t a big deal to me. I didn’t want anything special. My wife protested, but did her best to comply. She didn’t get a gift for me, but she did go out and get me a croissant and a decaf coffee, and she did just happened to get gifts for Derek Jr. that I would like. She bought two children’s books that will really let me ham it up with silly voices. She encouraged me to sleep in as late as I could, and when I awoke, I found Derek Jr. in an adorable little Nationals onesie that she had ordered in secret. My card, also from Derek Jr., was signed “Derek A.”

I’ve written far, far more in this journal than I ever expected to write, but I’ve still left so much out. A million little developmental milestones, idiosyncrasies, silly songs, and games that made Derek Jr. laugh or smile for a few minutes will be lost to time, have already been forgotten. That’s just how it works, but I can’t help mourning them, and I hate that I won’t have a place to record all the new ones that crop up. But it’s time. This is our new life, and the reason I don’t have time to write it all down is that we’re too busy living it.