While Sydney's upbringing, up until the arrival of her sister, was fairly calm and orderly, Lauren's seems so far to be anything but. The baby is constantly barraged by a dancing, whirling, screaming apparition in the person of her big sister, and she has parents whose attentions are necessarily divided. Her whole environment is a cacophany of new and interesting things, way over accelerated, and also our memories are short, so it seems to us that Lauren's development is coming along faster than her sister. Almost as though she is already running to catch up. Our four month old grasps things excitedly and gets easily frustrated when they drop from view, and has already mastered the art of pushing up onto her hands and knees, and she watches with rapt attention when her sister takes a bath or jumps up and down on the couch. We all know intellectually that the experience of the second is different from the first, but it is fascinating to watch the pageant unfold minutely, like so:
After dinner, Sydney instructs Mommy to build a Lego tower that "won't fall down." Sydney knows what the end result of a stable building should look like but her attention span is such that the actual structure may have one or two (or all) important elements missing. So Mommy builds a tight rectangular building. Daddy and Lauren come into watch.
Once the main structure is built, Sydney begins to embellish with antennas and chimneys. She names the tower the "Ministry of Acting". Meanwhile Lauren, who has been watching this pageant unfold for a while, begins to wiggle excitedly. Daddy leans down with Lauren so she can partake of the fun, in her limited way. Lauren hesitates, and then reaches out with her little hands to touch and grab.
"No, Lauren!" says Sydney, who was never disciplined in such a formal manner until relatively recently and whose tone imitates the stern voice of her parents. "Don't touch the building!"
"Don't worry, honey," says Daddy, "she's just playing with it a little bit. Can't you play with Lauren?"
"No!" Sydney says. "she'll knock it down!"
"She won't knock it down, she's too little," Daddy says, and immediately Lauren makes an uncoordinated, desperate grab for the corner and knocks the tower down, belying both Daddy's recent assurance and Mommy's statement that she created a stable structure in the first place.
Lauren's eyes go wide. You could almost hear the brand new thought forming in her baby brain: I did that! I made it go down!
Stretched beyond endurance, Sydney hits Lauren on the head with a Lego, gets yelled at by both parents, and collapses in a heap on the floor, completely despondent. Lauren, seemingingly assessing the situation, starts to cry.
"Look!" we both say, almost in unison, "You made the baby cry! Say you're sorry!"
Sydney looks mortified. Lauren is still crying.
"Sorry," Sydney says finally, through obviously gritted teeth, her entire soul silently rebelling against the whole thing.
Lauren stops crying, and grins at her sister.
Sibling rivalry: so it begins.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Messing up little kids
When I was possibly a little older than Lauren's sister, I asked my mother this fateful question for a reason I can't fully fathom:
"Mom? What is that puddle for?"
The puddle in question resided in the depression made by the tiedown of my father's Cessna 180. We spent a lot of time outside of the airplane as my father got it ready for flight, and as a curious three year old this time was interminably long. I therefore resorted, apparently, to patently silly questions.
So she answered my patently silly question in kind. She said, "It's the ants' swimming pool."
Since there were ants galore around the area too, this explanation made complete sense to me, and for the next three years I was content to play at the back of airplane, placing ants into their pool so they could have their swimming lessons.
It wasn't until much later that I discovered that ants actually can't swim and don't have swimming pools, and all I was really doing was drowning ants.
I've blamed this sorry incident on my mother for years, but the other day I was astounded to hear myself tell a child, who was in line with me at a check out and who wanted to know why my baby was in the shopping cart in her car seat along with my other purchases, that I bought her in the baby aisle.
Even worse, this child wasn't mine. As he left the store with his parents, I heard him asking his mom whether they could go get a baby in the baby aisle.
"Sorry!" I called out to the parents. But of course, it was too late. I got my sense of humor from my mother. I guess I can still blame her after all.
"Mom? What is that puddle for?"
The puddle in question resided in the depression made by the tiedown of my father's Cessna 180. We spent a lot of time outside of the airplane as my father got it ready for flight, and as a curious three year old this time was interminably long. I therefore resorted, apparently, to patently silly questions.
So she answered my patently silly question in kind. She said, "It's the ants' swimming pool."
Since there were ants galore around the area too, this explanation made complete sense to me, and for the next three years I was content to play at the back of airplane, placing ants into their pool so they could have their swimming lessons.
It wasn't until much later that I discovered that ants actually can't swim and don't have swimming pools, and all I was really doing was drowning ants.
I've blamed this sorry incident on my mother for years, but the other day I was astounded to hear myself tell a child, who was in line with me at a check out and who wanted to know why my baby was in the shopping cart in her car seat along with my other purchases, that I bought her in the baby aisle.
Even worse, this child wasn't mine. As he left the store with his parents, I heard him asking his mom whether they could go get a baby in the baby aisle.
"Sorry!" I called out to the parents. But of course, it was too late. I got my sense of humor from my mother. I guess I can still blame her after all.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Things I Wish I Knew the First Time Around
Having officially been inducted into the Been There, Done That Club, I am now entitled to smile knowingly and sympathetically at first time parents whose haggard appearance and constantly worried expression are cute in a "Oh yeah, I remember that" way. And although I haven't reached the upper echelons of the club (the Been There Done That With Teenager Clique) and will never be awarded any of its prizes (the Been There Done That Times Four or More Award) I do still feel qualified to give you my emerging list of Things I Wish I Knew the First Time Around:
1) Infants, when they first come out, are %$*&@@! tiny. This makes them seem fragile. On the other hand, they've been tossed about willi-nilly for the past 9 months and are used to odd and dizzying positions. This combined with their smallness makes them easy to cart around in one hand while doing any number of things with the other.
2) Infants, when they first come out, grow out of the little tiny infant stage so fast that you really don't have to worry that Aunt Bertha's old baptismal gown is yards too big right now. Just wait an hour. She'll fit it into it then. If she hasn't managed to deposit her various bodily fluids onto it in the next hour before she grows out of it, it may even be suitable for the next generation of infant.
3) All the infant is a stage. Crying at 2am? Spitting up pints? Unable to bear being in the crib/cradle/pack and play without your constant shining face? Don't worry. Soon they'll be doing other vaguely annoying things and giving up that current habit. And before you know it, they're three.
4) Crying is not the end of the world. It is merely the beginning of the apocalypse.
5) Every baby is different. They say this but its hard to believe until you're trying the tried and true on your next born and she stares at you with a quizzical look that says "What the &^%%^$ do you think you're doing?" Then you find that your new infant actually likes, for instance, to be carried around belly down on your arm so she can drool contentedly on the ground in long droppy, wet strings. What this means about her future personality, one can only guess.
That's all my wisdom for now. Excuse me, I have to go rescue my second born from my first born, who is trying to "share" a Mr Potato Head by pushing it into the first one's face. For some inexplicable reason, Lauren is unhappy about this situation. She'll probably grow up and dislike potatoes, and she'll never know why, until she has her own children and sees what a mess they can get themselves in. By that time I'll have graduated from the Been There Done That Club and hopefully be ready to join the Grandparents Club.
Whoa. Somebody said this parenting thing never ends.
1) Infants, when they first come out, are %$*&@@! tiny. This makes them seem fragile. On the other hand, they've been tossed about willi-nilly for the past 9 months and are used to odd and dizzying positions. This combined with their smallness makes them easy to cart around in one hand while doing any number of things with the other.
2) Infants, when they first come out, grow out of the little tiny infant stage so fast that you really don't have to worry that Aunt Bertha's old baptismal gown is yards too big right now. Just wait an hour. She'll fit it into it then. If she hasn't managed to deposit her various bodily fluids onto it in the next hour before she grows out of it, it may even be suitable for the next generation of infant.
3) All the infant is a stage. Crying at 2am? Spitting up pints? Unable to bear being in the crib/cradle/pack and play without your constant shining face? Don't worry. Soon they'll be doing other vaguely annoying things and giving up that current habit. And before you know it, they're three.
4) Crying is not the end of the world. It is merely the beginning of the apocalypse.
5) Every baby is different. They say this but its hard to believe until you're trying the tried and true on your next born and she stares at you with a quizzical look that says "What the &^%%^$ do you think you're doing?" Then you find that your new infant actually likes, for instance, to be carried around belly down on your arm so she can drool contentedly on the ground in long droppy, wet strings. What this means about her future personality, one can only guess.
That's all my wisdom for now. Excuse me, I have to go rescue my second born from my first born, who is trying to "share" a Mr Potato Head by pushing it into the first one's face. For some inexplicable reason, Lauren is unhappy about this situation. She'll probably grow up and dislike potatoes, and she'll never know why, until she has her own children and sees what a mess they can get themselves in. By that time I'll have graduated from the Been There Done That Club and hopefully be ready to join the Grandparents Club.
Whoa. Somebody said this parenting thing never ends.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Out of the mouth of...
"One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious." — Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
We're shopping somewhere--anywhere, it doesn't really matter--and the shopping experience takes twice as long because people form living breathing talking barriers around us. And then they open their mouths.
"That's a tiny baby!" they exclaim.
"Yes, it is!" We exclaim back, reaching around them for the milk.
"They don't stay that way!" these people always feel the need to inform us, even though our three year old daughter, who is considerably larger than her sister, is right next to us. Presumably, even if we were ignorant of the fact that babies grow larger, we'd know by now.
We bite our tongues so the sarcastic "really!?" does not come tumbling out.
And then they smile at me like I've just created a small galaxy. They ignore my husband, even if he's holding the baby.
This happens at every stop, with every single customer, every single time.
At least they've stopped asking me when my due date is.
We're shopping somewhere--anywhere, it doesn't really matter--and the shopping experience takes twice as long because people form living breathing talking barriers around us. And then they open their mouths.
"That's a tiny baby!" they exclaim.
"Yes, it is!" We exclaim back, reaching around them for the milk.
"They don't stay that way!" these people always feel the need to inform us, even though our three year old daughter, who is considerably larger than her sister, is right next to us. Presumably, even if we were ignorant of the fact that babies grow larger, we'd know by now.
We bite our tongues so the sarcastic "really!?" does not come tumbling out.
And then they smile at me like I've just created a small galaxy. They ignore my husband, even if he's holding the baby.
This happens at every stop, with every single customer, every single time.
At least they've stopped asking me when my due date is.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
And then..
I was discharged from the hospital with strict instructions not to drive a car, climb stairs, or pick up anything heavier than the baby for six weeks post-partum, all of which were promptly violated as soon as I got home. Aside from the fact that we run a farm, our bedroom is upstairs, it does not take much physical strength to drive a car, and we have a 28 pound toddler...do they really think our species survived for so long because the women lounged around in the cave while the men did all the hunting and the gathering?
Saturday, May 15, 2010
And the winner is...
Lauren, a girl, weighing 7 lbs 6 ounces, and measuring 19.5 inches long, born at 8:04am on May 10th, 2010.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Can't Touch This
Maybe I had a fiercer look in my face last time or maybe I was just lucky, but during my last pregnancy I only had one instance of someone trying to touch me, and that was an old, senile lady who signalled her intent from miles away and whom I was able to fend off before she actually managed her assault.
This time I have been touched at least five times, all of them unexpectedly.
Note to all the touchy-feely people out there: we teach our children it isn't okay if other people touch them and we teach them not to touch other people without asking, and you wouldn't dream of touching a woman on the belly any other time, so stop the ^&&%#^&#% touching!!
Pregnant women are not somehow suddenly in a different class of "human" when we become pregnant. We don't belong to you or to society. All the laws of polite society still apply to us. Don't ask us how much weight we've gained, don't tell us we look huge and for god's sake don't assault us with your ugly calloused dirty hands.
It's just never, ever ever ever acceptable. Okay? I mean, it just isn't. I'm sorry if your brain turns off at the mere sight of a pregnant woman, but just, I don't know, put your hands behind your back and tape your mouth shut if you have this problem. Because it is definitely your problem, not ours.
I did have one person ask me if she could touch me. It was nice of her to ask, I guess. Except, she'd already touched me. "Is it okay to touch?" she says, poking at my belly.
No.
No.
No.
This time I have been touched at least five times, all of them unexpectedly.
Note to all the touchy-feely people out there: we teach our children it isn't okay if other people touch them and we teach them not to touch other people without asking, and you wouldn't dream of touching a woman on the belly any other time, so stop the ^&&%#^&#% touching!!
Pregnant women are not somehow suddenly in a different class of "human" when we become pregnant. We don't belong to you or to society. All the laws of polite society still apply to us. Don't ask us how much weight we've gained, don't tell us we look huge and for god's sake don't assault us with your ugly calloused dirty hands.
It's just never, ever ever ever acceptable. Okay? I mean, it just isn't. I'm sorry if your brain turns off at the mere sight of a pregnant woman, but just, I don't know, put your hands behind your back and tape your mouth shut if you have this problem. Because it is definitely your problem, not ours.
I did have one person ask me if she could touch me. It was nice of her to ask, I guess. Except, she'd already touched me. "Is it okay to touch?" she says, poking at my belly.
No.
No.
No.
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