alien love child

No matter how many times benben's maman told me this past week, I couldn't seem to remember that Saturday afternoon was our infant CPR training — and the first time we'd leave baby bubba with a sitter, the remarkable Miss Angel.

I'm very glad we took the class, and I feel guilty and stupid for not at least reading up on infant CPR between Benday (July 5) and this weekend, but now we're caught up.

(And we don't understand why we weren't taught in the hospital what to do when an infant is choking, since it took up a whole 3 minutes of yesterday's 3-hour class.)

One thing I'm very grateful for is the weird little practice dummy you see above and to the right. The Actar 911 Infantry CPR practice mannequin.

Here's why.

After spending an hour or two on adult and child CPR, going through video scenarios, practice, more video, more practice, they finally get to infant-specific CPR. The video shows grandma and grandpa baby-sitting. Grandma goes to check on her grand-daughter in the crib and finds that the baby girl's not breathing.

Already I feel my anxiety starting to spike. Then grandma lets out a cry of anguish and I have to will my tears to stay inside my head. I try to keep my cool through the rest of the scene, but I keep asking myself why I'm the only one struggling. Well, I wasn't. In my focus on not embarrassing myself in front of pregnant strangers, I failed to notice that benben's mama is having her own emotional struggles while this video drama plays out.

Once the scenario was over and our instructor paused the tape, she explained that this was the point when infant CPR students tended to lose their focus. So to give us some emotional distance from the practice we had to do, she was going to pass out alien babies for us to resuscitate.

God bless her.

We now know how to keep the Actar 911 Infantry infant breathing until the paramedics arrive. Maybe that will translate to knowing what to do if something similar ever happens with a human baby. I hope we never find out.

- papa