Not much scares David Curry. A tall, burly man with tattooed arms, he tracks sex offenders for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
The tough exterior he maintains most of the time cracked a bit as Curry gingerly handled 11-week-old Ella Grace Franckowiak. Ella is 11 pounds of pale skin, blue eyes and wisps of blond hair, and she had the Odenton man flustered.
Nothing Curry was doing could make her stop crying. He tried resting her over his shoulder. He bounced her delicately on his knee. He cradled her against his broad chest. The tears kept falling.
"What's wrong?" he cajoled. "I know what the problem is, you have this big, goofy ugly man holding you." Defeated, he handed a disconsolate Ella over to her father, Shawn Franckowiak.
Curry is a "rookie" and Franckowiak is a "veteran" of the "Boot Camp for New Dads," a three-hour monthly workshop offered by the Anne Arundel Medical Center that brings new and expectant fathers together to have frank discussions about how babies will change their lives and relationships with their partners.
Curry was getting a taste of what life might be once he and his wife have their first baby, due April 13, and he had just learned a key lesson: Fatherhood is an art of patience and humility.
"Guys are wired to want to fix things," Mike Johnson, a Severna Park real estate agent, father of two and facilitator of the program, told eight rookie fathers at a workshop Sunday. "You want to look up a manual and fix it. There's no manual for a crying baby, guys. Babies will cry. It's the only way they know how to communicate."
Johnson began the boot camp at the hospital in Annapolis last September after noticing that there were dozens of classes geared toward mothers -- from basics on birthing to breastfeeding -- but little for fathers.
"Our fathers' definition of involvement around the birth was buying the cigars and waiting in the waiting room," Johnson said. "But this is a new generation. We're not on the sidelines anymore. Fathers are in the delivery room now. We want to be a part of the process."
Johnson's observation seems to ring true. Over the last decade, a new genre of pregnancy and baby books for dads began appearing on the shelves sandwiched between What to Expect When You're Expecting and Your Baby and Child. In the past five years, 19 new books of advice for expectant fathers have emerged, according to Amazon.com.
Johnson had participated in a new dads boot camp in Colorado about seven years ago, when he and his wife were expecting their first child. But he was disappointed to see the course wasn't offered here when he moved with his family about five years ago. He found the course had a national curriculum, so he developed the program here and began opening it up for men only, with a firm restriction against allowing females over 2 feet tall.
"I wanted to create an atmosphere where guys could open up and start asking the questions that they can't in other parenting or birthing classes," Johnson said. "Sex, for instance. Guys want to know when it's safe to become intimate again, and they feel shy talking about that in front of their partners and other couples. But it's a practical question that they're really curious about."
At a recent workshop, Johnson sat in a circle with the rookie fathers, chatting openly about everything from what kind of fathers they want to be to how to be supportive during postpartum depression and five key ways to calm a crying baby. The fathers-to-be got a chance to sit in small groups with veteran dads, who had been through this program or something similar in the past year.
In the process, the expectant dads learned a new language with words such as swaddling and the "Gatekeeper Phenomenon," where new mothers tend to be overprotective of their children and make fathers feel like they're doing things wrong.
"Some of you may have noticed, your wives or girlfriends aren't the person you knew 6, 7, 8 months ago," Johnson said.
The men nodded in agreement. "Sometimes, they'll feel blue after the baby. Just overly sad, crying."
"Why?" a rookie asks.
"Because of hormones," Johnson said. "It's a huge change in women's bodies. They're overwhelmed. They feel like they're expected to know how to do everything. And we have to be there to tell them, 'It's OK. We'll figure it out together.'"
Chris Click of Bel Air, whose wife delivered 5-month-old Juliana at the Annapolis hospital, came to the workshop to share some of his experiences with expectant fathers. It included practical tips such as how to change a diaper and not being afraid to dress a baby.
Click tackled heftier matters, too, such as rekindling romance with a spouse.
"All of a sudden you're No. 3, it's baby, mom, and then you, and that's hard to handle," Click said. "It's hard to separate mom from the little one."
Johnson steps in: "The courtship begins all over again. Start with date nights."
The rookies nod, still nervous, but happy to have a little more information than they had three hours earlier.
"The thing is, people tell you it's going to be this huge change in your life, but I need data, I need numbers, specifics," Curry said. "How big of a change? When you say, I won't get sleep, how much sleep are we talking here? I feel like we got into that here. I have no experience with children, so this really helped me learn about what works, what doesn't."
Boot Camp for New Dads is offered once a month at the Annapolis hospital. It costs $50. For more information on the next workshop or to register, visit www.aahs.org or call 443-481-4000.
ruma.kumar@baltsun.com