Hello, it’s me again. Coming at you from the wee hours of the morning. YES YES I KNOW that I owe you a 2025-in-review. And I know that it’s very nearly July, which is the latest one yet. But I have a good excuse. It’s a fresh baby!
And even better, my son has VERY RECENTLY learned how to sleep. Which means I don’t need to be around all night just in case he starts YELLING. This is a very nice change.
Of course, my sleep is still fucked, which is why I’m awake in the wee hours. But I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to feel like I have the mental capacity to produce something of extracurricular value.
Perhaps you’ve heard, but parenting turns out to be (mechanically) very difficult. What do I mean by this? It’s not hard to love the little guy, but it IS hard to wake up every 2h to make sure he’s fed. It’s not hard to get him to nap, but it’s hard to get him to nap in a way that lets me to ANYTHING ELSE (they call this the nap trap.)
There is all of this baby paraphernalia that one seems to magically (thanks Erin!) acquire. Ostensibly it’s job is to help with parenting, but more often than not, its job is to make your life as miserable as possible. Consider the humble crib. Our crib is slightly less than four feet (120cm) tall. I, for comparison, am six feet (180cm) tall. The mattress inside the crib sits at the very bottom.
If you think through the constraints here, you’ll notice that something has to give. This is a deep bucket with 4ft tall railings, which act as a hinge in the equation. I tell you what—it’s impossible as FUCK to lift from the knees when you are plucking a little one out such a setup.
All the new dads I know have recently tweaked their backs. It’s not an old man thing. It’s a crib thing.
OF COURSE, OF COURSE, the crib is adjustable. There are, in fact, three positions that the mattress can be in:
- RIGHT AT THE DAMN BOTTOM
- VERY SLIGHTLY ABOVE THE BOTTOM
- JUST A TOUCH ABOVE THAT
Each position is maybe 5cm higher than the previous. If you recompute all of the physics above, you will see that this doesn’t change things in the least. I’m still over a meter deep in this damn crib.
When would I want the bottom-most setting on this crib? When I have a very tall toddler who has been studying bouldering. When would I want the topmost setting? A slightly less tall toddler who has been studying bouldering.
Consider instead our bassinet (a smaller crib for smaller babies, if you’re slightly fresher to the baby game than I am.) Our bassinet has an adjustable height, and came advertised with the killer feature that the side would fold down, so you could just roll the baby out into bed with you. Sounds nice, right?
NOT.
To actually get this feature to work, with one hand you need to hold down a button on one end of the outside of the bassinet. And with the other hand you need to hold down a different button on the opposite end. And now that these two buttons are held, the locking mechanism releases, and you can use your third hand to gently lower the now-unlocked side. Noticing any problems?
That’s right! You need to use a third hand because the lowering-side is actually spring loaded, so it won’t stay down no matter what you do. And it doesn’t lower all the way down, so if you can manage to hold it with your forearms, you can then move your two hands from the outside of the bassinet inside and try to scoop your baby into bed, except that the side will still get in the way.
Like what the actual fuck?
My assumption here is that thing about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. I’m sure some baby fell out of a bassinet with a lowering side one time, so now it’s NOT EVER ALLOWED TO DO THAT EVER AGAIN. And some idiot put the crib mattress too high for too long, and their baby rolled out and died. So now the only adjustable options are COMPLETELY USELESS AND EFFECTIVELY NOT ADJUSTMENTS WHATSOEVER.
This damn stuff is everywhere when you go to look at it. Babies can’t have stuffed animals in their crib because they might suffocate on it and die. They can’t have blankets in their crib because they might suffocate and die. They can’t sleep on soft mattresses because they might suffocate and die. They can’t be swaddled because they might roll over and suffocate and die—even if there’s nothing to suffocate and die ON because you’ve already removed all of that stuff. So what’s left? SLEEP ON YOUR BACK ON A HARD MATTRESS WITHOUT ANY BLANKETS OR ANYTHING TO CUDDLE WITH.
No wonder they don’t sleep well. I wouldn’t either.
Thankfully there’s a happy ending to all of this. After a few months of this crap, I got frustrated. And figured aut inveniam viam aut faciam. So I took out my drill and I made the necessary adjustment options on the crib. Now the mattress sits a foot below the TOP, which means we can scoop the little guy in and out without needing to throw out our backs. And believe it or not, once using the crib wasn’t physically harmful to us, we found sleep training to be significantly less awful. So much so that it’s now a week later and he has been sleeping throughout the night for five days in a row.
How’s THAT for “we can solve this.”