Beavis and Butthead

A blog that is entirely made up of me complaining about how much sleep I am not getting would likely get old after a while... especially since JSD and NBB are reading this like, "Yeah, it sucks, but it passes... MOVE ON ALREADY!!" So rather than continuing to complain about being tired, I am going to take today's blog post to report about the most surreal moment I had while in the hospital.

Picture it- Tuesday August 11- Nico's second day out. He's chillin, like a villain. That's what villains do- they chill. Dave and I are wondering what the hell we got ourselves into... between Nico crying at night and being awakened, literally, every hour on the hour for "vital checks" where they check my temperature, blood pressure and whatnot, we are what you would call "bleary eyed". This is a condition that results from not getting any sleep- and is largely characterized by the inability to focus one's eyes. Basically, you are so tired your eyes osscilate between crossing and rolling up into the back of your head when you focus on something. If you remember, we were up late on Sunday night doing the birth, and then Monday with the crying and the no sleeping... by Tuesday, were were pretty worse for the wear.

At this point, I am starting to feel like someone cut open my stomach and placed a bowling ball in there, in place of Nico. I felt a bit like a spectator of my life at this point. Which is why what happened next was disturbing, albeit kind of funny. So on Tuesday, I am am trying to finish up breakfast while breastfeeding Nico... I am definitely topless in the hospital room... anyone who walks by my door could catch a glimpse of the ginormitude... in all of its unglory... these two randoms poke their head into the room, see I am a bit unavailable and excuse themselves, promising to come back in a little while.

They reappear a little while later- but for here on out, these two randoms will be referred to as the Beavis and Butthead, because I felt like I was watching an episode of the Beavis and Butthead show being acted out in my hospital room.

So Beavis and Butthead come in, and without even introducing themselves to me (the mom) or Dave (the dad), they start arguing about who gets to hold Nico first. Turns out these two are the photographers from the hospital. Now, Mama Bishop probably knows where this is about to go... because, I can't lie, I take a DAMN GOOD picture. Really, I do. If I am really honest with myself, there are very few things in life that I do well... I am an okay soccer coach, a passable demographer, a fake sociologist, a terrible wife and a superficial hippie... but I am a DAMN GOOD PHOTOGRAPHER. Seriously- if I am really honest with myself, I probably should have just manned up and become a photographer and not gone the way of Academia. It is what it is... I started taking pictures with my mom's tricked out Canon with the telephoto lens when I was in middle school. Before I started caring about playing sports, I spent most of JJ's tournament weekends shooting pictures of him and his team. And this was back in the day when you did this with film in the camera. When I taught preschool, every parent got several beautiful pictures of their kids during the year... Action shots, portraits, you name it, I do it.

Now, there are very few people in this world that I would actively seek out to shoot the first photos of our child. Given my skillz with a camera, I think that this is justifiable... no where in this list is there Beavis and Butthead who are probably not even real photographers, but rather randoms hired by the hospital. So, as you can imagine, I am already a bit put off by this arrangement.

Add to this, that newborns are notoriously ugly when they are still in the hospital. Most babies that are born vaginally, have long pointy heads, because their heads get squished on the way out... most of the time, their eyes arent quite open yet... a lot are bald... and many have kind of a ruddy complexion, that seems to be a reaction to not being surrounded in water 24-7. While Nico wasn't exactly "ugly", he wasn't 100% adorable yet, because he was still pretty red. I would rather wait a bit before shooting pictures of him (at least till the red goes down). But I have Beavis and Butthead in my room- all up in Nico's grill, arguing about who gets to hold him first and who is going to shoot the picture, and a whole mess of nonsense that made my head hurt. Beavis asks me what color background I want... I say green, and a minute later, Butthead tells Beavis that green is a horrible color to have for a background. This goes on for like 15 minutes, them play arguing with each other, talking about how adorable Nico is, and how they just want to "eat him up", complaining to each other that one has held him longer than the other got to hold him for...

So they get done shooting 5 pictures of him. 5. 5 pictures. All of that nonsense, for 5 pictures.

But here is the best part... when they were done, and Nico was safely returned to his bassinet, out of the reach of crazy, all of a sudden one of them was all up in MY grill talking about package options... I was like, "What?" Yeah, apparently, this outfit sells the images in the form of prints, postcards, birth announcements, etc. And no, they are not a good value. At all. And that is when I figured it out- its a racket. They do the whole routine for new parents. The new parents end up placing an order... 2 weeks go by and then you get your ugly pictures of your kid... and you realize, you were duped.

In the end, we bought the picture CD... thinking that in the event that they were any good, that we'd at least have the digital versions for FB and whatnot... and so that I can edit the pictures to make them cute...