Things I Never Noticed Until I Had a Baby

Do you know how loud refrigerators are?

Whoever designed the ice maker in our refrigerator never had kids, otherwise the ice maker would have come equipped with a more family friendly acoustic system. The ice just falls and CRASHES into the other ice, and no one within a two block radius of our house can sleep because of all the ice crashing in our refrigerator. Appliance designers should be required to have kids.

Men pee loudly. OH. MY. GOD. Could you pee a little louder? Is it because you aren’t sitting down and masking the sound of the splashing water with your butt? Are you trying to pee that loudly? Whoever designed the male bladder and urination program should be required to have kids, kids who sleep in the room right next to the bathroom and can hear the loud peeing through the vent in the wall. I can hear you peeing over the sound of the ice crashing in the refrigerator.

Jesus Christ, what is it with the sneezing? Why are sneezes so loud? It’s not like I can learn to sneeze more softly, because any attempt to muffle the sound of a sneeze only makes the sound of exploding air more annoying and piercing. And what is it about breastfeeding that causes me to sneeze? My chest is covered in what I call Sneeze Scars, what happens when Leta is startled by my sneezing and jumps off my boob taking my nipple and half my breast with her. No more sneezing! I need my nipples!

I am ready to sue the city of Salt Lake for sidewalk negligence. And I’m willing to bet that if the sidewalks here are in such disrepair they are in just as bad shape elsewhere, and we totally have a shitty sidewalk epidemic on our hands. How am I supposed to push a stroller over these sidewalks? How many babies before mine have been jolted awake by the bumps and cracks in the concrete created by unruly tree roots and water damage? I can’t go five feet without veering around a pothole IN THE SIDEWALK. Is this why people move to the suburbs, for the relatively new and bump-free sidewalks? Honey, can we move to the suburbs?

Every single floor board in our house creaks, and I swear they didn’t creak before Leta was born. Now they creak under the weight of our shadows. And they don’t creak softly or longingly. They creak violently and adamantly, like an angry symphony of floor boards trying furiously to recreate the sounds of souls damned to hell, souls crying out for mercy. The 35 pound dog causes the floors to creak.

And then there are the annoying things the dog does now that he did then but they weren’t annoying then. But now is not then, and now when he jumps off the bed in the middle of the night and the floor boards flare up in the most violent screech of creaking, I have to wonder if he is doing it on purpose. He is being loud on purpose. He is totally in on this new conspiracy of loudness, an evil conspiracy to wake up my baby.

Oh my god, the doorbell just rang. WHAT KIDLESS IDIOT INVENTED THE DOORBELL?