The Early Shift: Real Tears

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

May 12
Today was the first time I left my wife to put Derek Jr. down to sleep on her own. My friend Michael Clair had an event for his book about the Czech national baseball team, and after watching him pour everything into this book for years, there was no way I could miss it. It was a great time. Jay Jaffe hosted, so I got to chat with him, Mike and his family, and a couple other cool baseball people I’d never met before. But it was also a disorienting experience.

It started with a tactical error on my part. On my way from the subway station to the bookstore, I passed an old Polish bakery and couldn’t help ordering one of the poppy seed buns in the window. When the clerk reached for the display, I realized that the buns were way, way bigger than they looked from the outside. I was now a block and a half away from the event, holding a bun the size of my face inside a crisp paper bag. Because I am a fool for baked goods, and because I didn’t want to distract everyone by crinkling the bag for the entire event, I did what had to be done. I stuffed the entire face-sized bun into my face during the three-minute walk to the bookstore.

I sat up front next to Mike’s wife, and as the event got going, I felt my baseline exhaustion combine with a massive carbohydrate crash. It was not ideal. It also felt so strange to just sit there without having anything else to do. Nobody needed me. There were no chores to do, no way I could help out. It was probably the first time in a month I’d worn jeans rather than basketball shorts. My wife had encouraged me to go out and have fun without worrying about her and Derek Jr. I suppose it should have been a relaxing feeling, but I just wasn’t ready for it. Once the Q&A ended and I’d gotten in a few minutes of small talk, I fairly ran out of the bookstore and back to the subway.

May 13
I caught a few pitches of the Phillies and Red Sox today, just enough to get nostalgic about Andrew Painter and Trevor Story. Remember when Andrew Painter was first expected to come up? Three years ago, I wrote a whole article about how the 19-year-old Painter looked like he was going to break camp with the Phillies. The baby-faced fireballer was the talk of the league, and then, just like that, he was under the knife. Three years later, he’s finally made his debut, but he’s no longer the next big thing. His fastball is still fast enough, but it doesn’t grade out particularly well, and he’s 1-4 with an ERA over six.

Remember — much longer ago — when Trevor Story debuted in 2016? Not only did he hit home runs in each of his first four games, he homered twice in games one and four. I remember it so clearly. People were tripping over themselves to make “What a big… STORY” jokes. Here we are 10 years later, and, for the second year in a row, I’m beside myself that a Red Sox team with World Series aspirations [Note from the future: Yeeesh] still hasn’t decided to eat the money it owes him and move on.

Nostalgia is the order of the day, because I can’t stop noticing how fast Derek Jr. is changing. Specifically, she’s finally putting on some baby fat, and she’s doing it at breakneck speed. Her cheeks have ballooned out. Her skinny little chicken legs had already turned into turkey legs. Now they’re verging on hippo status. She’s starting to get rolls on her arms, and her little fingers look like elephant trunks. She’s such a chonker — that’s the most frequent descriptor around the apartment — and it’s delightful. Seriously, check out these chins.

It’s not just how she looks, though. She’s moving on to new developmental milestones. She can drink more milk in a sitting. She’s starting to look at the world around her as if she understands what she’s seeing. She’s starting to sleep longer during the night. And her legs are getting so long. She’s barely started wearing 0-3 month pajamas, which are supposed to fit her for another two months, but we’re already talking about cutting the feet off some because she’s running out of room.

The one that really bothers my wife, though, is that Derek Jr. is getting more complicated. Every day her world expands, which is both beautiful and bittersweet. When your world is small, your problems are simple and so are their solutions. For the first month of her life, Derek Jr. would absolutely melt when she was in my wife’s arms. No matter what was wrong, when my wife scooped her up and held her, she would instantly relax and feel safe. It brought my wife so much joy and confidence. Now, Derek Jr.’s feelings are sometimes strong enough that being in my wife’s arms doesn’t instantly fix everything.

I feel it, too. Derek Jr. is getting better at getting her food down, which means less need for a designated burper. And now that she’s making eye contact with us all the time, my trick of rocking her to sleep by way of putting on a song and dancing her around the room isn’t working quite as well. When I look down to gauge the heaviness of her eyelids, she locks eyes with me, which stimulates something social in her and wakes her back up.

It’s all exciting, but it’s happening so fast. Derek Jr. is so different now than she was even a week or two ago, and all we have to remember that time by is a handful of photos. Our baby is still absurdly new, but when she’s asleep in her crib, we sit around looking at pictures of her when she was younger and wondering where the time went. Twice now, my wife has quoted something she’s read: “You wake up with a new baby every day.” Twice, I have helpfully chimed in with some ancient Greek wisdom, “You can’t step into the same baby twice.” Twice, this particular joke has fallen flat. I will keep trying.

May 14
We’re into week seven now, and Derek Jr. is starting to have some trouble with gas. According to a sleep-training book my wife is reading, that means we’re right on schedule, but that’s only so reassuring when you’re dealing with a crying child. I mean that literally. We’ve just reached a new milestone: When Derek Jr. cries, real tears well up in her sad, little eyes. That didn’t happen for the first month of her life. She’d cry, but her eyes would be dry. All of a sudden, the tears are here and it’s heartbreaking. “The tears are the worst thing in the world,” my wife says. “Go back in,” she tells them. There’s nothing in the world we wouldn’t do to make Derek Jr. happy, but she doesn’t know that. She just knows that her tummy doesn’t feel good.

Derek Jr. didn’t get much sleep last night, and in turn, we got a whole lot less sleep than she did. We’re hanging on by a thread today. In the afternoon, the three of us are sitting on the couch, shell-shocked. My wife is nursing Derek Jr., whose eating is interrupted by intermittent gastrointestinal troubles.

“Sad little farts,” my wife sympathizes.
“That’s a terrible band name,” I reply.
“[Toot],” chimes in Derek Jr.

Tonight is much better. Derek Jr. goes down around 8:30, and I catch the last inning or so of the Cubs-Braves game. Pete Crow-Armstrong has a dirty uniform, and I’m instantly bummed that I missed whatever he did to get it that way. The main thing I notice, though, is Aaron Bummer, and not just because his name is a pithy description of what’s been plaguing my daughter.

Michael Rosen has written a fair bit about how each pitcher’s delivery exists on a continuum from linear to rotational. (Ask him about Cole Ragans’ pelvis some time.) Bummer is a true side-armer, and he has to be one of the most rotational guys in the entire league. His delivery looks like you turned a trebuchet on its side. The result is a motion so casual that it looks like he’s just flipping a frisbee up toward home plate. He slings the ball in there, and then, to my delight, he follows through by kicking his back leg up lazily and letting it spin around in a little pirouette. If baseball had a yearbook superlatives page (an idea I am definitely going to pitch to Meg Rowley during the offseason), Bummer would get voted Most Likely To Be a Dreidel.

I’m excited to watch Daniel Palencia close out the game. Palencia became the face of the World Baseball Classic when cameras caught him with tears in his eyes just before he struck out Roman Anthony to seal the title for Venezuela, and I’ve been waiting for a chance to see more of him. I watch him blow a fastball by a Brave for his first strikeout and get to hear the Cubs color commentator yell “¡Gasolina!” But Derek Jr. seemingly hears it too and interprets it as an invitation to get even gassier. I miss the final outs changing her diaper and soothing her back to sleep.

She sleeps much, much better tonight, and when she wakes up just past five in the morning, I’m prepared to help her through the gas pain. It comes in waves, each one ending in an adorable little toot massively disproportionate to the moaning and spasming that preceded it. All I can do is sit in the rocking chair and hold her tight, pulling her knees up to her chest. “Sometimes you just need to curl into a ball and fart,” I observe to my wife as she creeps into the room and prepares for the shift change. “Babies, they’re just like us.”

My wife feeds Derek Jr. from the bottle, and I stick around to help out because she has been breastfeeding almost exclusively and isn’t yet confident with the bottle. It goes beautifully, and we get Derek Jr. down for another long stretch of sleep. Everyone is going to have a better day today. Before I clock out and get some sleep, I tell my wife the saddest news of the night. Those tears that have started welling in Derek Jr.’s eyes when she cries? As I held her tight during a wave of gas pain, I finally saw one roll down her perfect cheek.