Babies are amazing scientists. As creatures who know very little about anything, every day as a baby is a day for trying out new things and exploring the world. And as a new parent you spend just as much time trying to figure out how the baby works. What makes it sleep? What makes it cry? What makes it laugh? So much of your day depends on these questions that it’s easy to become borderline obsessive about it. You are very much at the whim of a seemingly unpredictable, capricious animal.
Some people, given such pressures, might turn to religion or some other faith-based way of making sense of the chaos. In the nearly nine months since The Master came into our world I’ve tended to see things through a quasi-scientific, mathematical lens.
Come with me as I flagrantly and irresponsibly subvert the fields of science and maths for my own jocular purposes.
First off there is the strange (until you’ve figured out the mechanism) gift that babies have for placing their flailing limbs directly in the path of a dirty nappy. It is truly uncanny how a small person who barely has control over their arms and legs will successfully plant a foot in the very centre of a disgusting poo-smeared nappy EVERY TIME it is removed.
Every. Damn. Time.
Or at least it’s amazing until you realise that baby feet carry a positive charge whereas dirty nappies carry a negative one. Once you understand that it’s a simple matter of magnetism, the inevitability of poop-covered heels becomes far less surprising.
My son was a prodigious spewer when he was younger thanks in part to gastic reflux and I was constantly amazed at how far his projectile efforts could reach. I would put my precious phone a good distance away from him while feeding him only to find that it would still get covered in chucked up milk. Eventually I discovered the terrible truth. His spew would always range exactly far enough to stain or ruin something. This led to my variation on Pythagoras’ theorem.
Who doesn’t love a nice Venn diagram? One of the things I wasn’t prepared for with regards to caring for an infant was the freaky “sleeping with eyes open” thing. You think a sleeping baby, you think peaceful little angel, right? Not twitchy sleep zombie. And yet, twitchy sleep zombie is what you get a disturbing amount of the time. I mean, as far as I’m concerned it’s supposed to work like first diagram, not the second one.
Lastly there’s the small matter of, er, matter. The law of conservation of mass explains that mass can neither be created nor destroyed. Imagine my surprise when I found that this doesn’t necessarily apply to babies. You may put in a reasonably small amount of food or mass, only to find that it had tripled or quadrupled only minutes later when it was being vomited back out again. It’s counterintuitive. I mean, how can an ickle widdle baby tummy even hold that much in the first place? Which is how we know that babies have Tardis-tummies to cope with the expanding milky-mass. The process by which a couple of hundred millilitres of milk can become enough liquid to completely drench an adult, several square metres of carpet, soft furnishings and an infant is still unknown but definitely a Tardis is involved.
Do your observations support the theories above? Have you any half-baked scientific theories you’d like to share?
Originally published on Stuff, 28/08/2014