No babies here.

I actually thought Skipper's picture represented her sitting on a throne of human skulls. I could be wrong.

More ranting

You guys! It's happening again! Not even two weeks into the school year, and I'm already finding myself weeping (WEEPING!) in conversations about the state of public education, and the way in general that we fail, as a society, to support kids. Ugh.

Miscellaneous:

• Duchess is missing her classmates who have gone off to the magic TAG school. She is once again on the top of her class, academically, and ready to coast along for another year of not trying too hard. I'm ready for another year of feeling sad about her schooling.
• I saw one of the Homework Club kids I worked with a lot last year. She's excited that this year she's going to be early to school instead of late every day, because a different adult is dropping her off. She's a decent kid. I want her to make it.
• A friend of mine has taken in foster kids who have some developmental delays - nothing serious, and it all seems like the consequence of early neglect, rather than inherent deficits. The little one, after just a few weeks, is making huge strides - she's still young enough that her elastic little brain can compensate. I don't know about the big one. I want them both to make it, too.
• I met a new parent at Duchess's school who actually transferred her kids there from another district on a No Child Left Behind waiver. (The receiving school has to accept the waiver, so she couldn't get her kids into one of the better PPS schools, but she still felt that getting into our school was a huge improvement from where her kids were.) She is amazed by the level of parental involvement, the quality of teaching, the attitude of the kids, and the general feeling at the school, and is thrilled to have her kids there. This reminded me that, in spite of my feelings of despair about Duchess's school, there are many, many, many (many) schools where kids are much (much) worse off.

After all the Talented and Gifted hubbub last year, we decided not to push to get Duchess nominated for TAG identification. However, this fall, I have reversed myself, and decided to go ahead and nominate Duchess. I had three experiences that led me to the decision. First, as part of my Big Volunteer Thing I've been doing at Duchess's school, I've been calling enrichment programs, and I spoke to a staffperson at one excellent, super-expensive program who said "Oh, we do lots of classes at your school, for TAG kids!" Second, I recently learned about a cool-sounding math class, offered by that very program, that took place last spring in mornings before school. Duchess would have loved it. It was only open to TAG kids, and it was free. Third, I had a conversation with a woman, a parent of older kids, who has worked with Duchess in school, and respects her reading and analysis chops. We talked about the ethical ugliness that is TAG, and her experience as a teacher and a parent, and she said "You've got to get Duchess identified as TAG."* So I went and picked up the forms. There's a nomination and testing process that will unfold over the year in some mysterious way. I told Duchess (from whom nothing like this can be hidden, as she is way more persistent than Harriet the Spy) that no matter how the test identifies her, we will continue in the conviction that she is awesome-identified.

It just all, as you (very well) know, makes me furious. Nearly every kid in the school would benefit from a cool math class at least as much as Duchess's TAG classmates. While the TAG screening test is explicitly designed to be accessible for kids who can't read English well, so in theory it's a great way to identify kids from all backgrounds who have intellectual aptitude, the fact is that the kids in Duchess's grade who are receiving TAG resources are all middle-class-or-richer kids. TAG resources are offered not just to TAG-identified kids, but also to kids identified as "TAG-potential" which means that they didn't get a qualifying score but had strong "advocacy" scores (as rated by their teachers and parents) and work samples. Guess which kids are likely to have strong "advocacy" scores and work samples? I know plenty of kids at Duchess's school whose parents, for many reasons,* aren't going to nominate them for anything and aren't supporting their homework and school activities to encourage them to produce strong work samples. Those kids would benefit from cool math classes as much as any kid. The program should be called Talented and Gifted and Having Pushy Parents.

And now I am a Pushy Parent, and I'm feeling pretty shitty about the ethics of being a Pushy Parent. I hate that I am trying to extract more resources for my own already-very-lucky child, out of a limited pool of resources. My kid has everything she needs to thrive, and I'm greedily grubbing for more, because I can, and because I want more for her. This goes against my belief that not only is it in our benefit to support all the children in our community, so that they will thrive in our community and make it a better place, but that we have a moral obligation to help them flourish. I go around and around on how to address this. I can't not try to get Duchess everything I can -  I'm a primate, after all, and this is a competitive world. As with most things, the current situation means that my refusal to take stuff for her just means more resources for OTHER privileged kids. But I have an obligation to do something about that current situation. I just don't know what, yet.

Anyway, Duchess is determined to be rich when she grows up, TAG or no TAG. We recently listened to a podcast identifying the most lucrative college majors. She listened to the top ten majors, and decided on naval architecture (#7, I think), as it is the best fit with her already-identified career hopes. She's going to be a naval architect during the day, and an author at night (writing great books while cuddled up with her husband and her Great Dane - she's fairly detailed in her planning). Skipper decided that she'd go for #1, petroleum engineering, since she has no strong preferences yet. I didn't say anything about how I feel about petroleum engineering; I'm pretty sure I won't have to worry about it. Of course, Skipper is also planning to have seven children,*** so she's either going to have to be rich or not work at all.



* Note the language. I've got to get her identified - I think that zeros in on everything wrong with the system right there.
**Stress, language barriers, cultural barriers, poor health, lack of time, and other factors, including the assumption that it doesn't make that much difference, which is the assumption under which I've been operating.
*** Duchess is holding fast to her determination to have no children at all. Having watched Skipper be born, she definitely doesn't want to give birth, and she says it's clear that kids are a pain in the butt. I feel kind of bad about this, as I'm the one giving her this impression with my apparently negative attitude about parenting, but it seems that Skipper has no such qualms.

Not bored.

Two weeks ago, I took Skipper to a library story time for 2-year-olds. The room was packed with excited kids, all running around, dancing, pushing up to the librarian to get her attention and see the books up close. Skipper sat in my lap, scowling, the whole time.* There were a lot of parents there, too, of course, and I suddenly became aware of my total disinterest in engaging with them or paying any attention to their kids. When Dutch was little, I would have been all over something like this. I would have been chatting with people and comparing parenting strategies, checking out their kids... but no. Not now. I just wanted to get out of there. I was bored.

Parenting small Dutch was a nice period of blissful ignorance- there was a lot of stuff about it that was hard,**  but for the most part we were able to trust our instincts and feel pretty good about the way things were going. When she got old enough to talk and be independent, a whole new world unfolded to us, a world in which we were parenting an actual human being, her own ineffable self, whose problems were increasingly hard to solve, and often seemed to be really not our job to fix anyway. I think we've come around to embracing that. Dutch is a person, with flaws and strengths, and she lives with us, and our relationships with her are fluid and challenging. What we're supposed to be doing to "parent" her is rarely clear, and there's a lot of seat-of-the-pants "parenting" going on around here.*** And that's good. I'm usually not bored. I'm often annoyed, frustrated, or tired, but almost never bored by this job.

Today a baby came to our house, and I really enjoyed seeing him and chatting with him. He was absolutely adorable - exactly in that adorable window of adorableness at 5 months when babies are eager to interact but really can't screw anything up yet and are interested in and entertained by stuff like jar lids. Adorable, I tell you. I got to hold and play with him for a few minutes while his parents were busy, and I loved holding his dense, interested little body. But it felt weird, like I had never held a baby before. And I had no idea what he wanted to do. And while he was adorable, I didn't want to hang out with him any more than that 5 minutes.

I'm done, you guys. No more babies, no more toddlers. Give me the gap-toothed 7-year-olds with their weird conversational leaps and their endless questions. Give me the arguing preschoolers raging against the unfair rules. Babies and toddlers are so last year.

Postscript: I don't mean to imply that babies and toddlers are boring, because they're not, or that parenting babies and toddlers isn't hard, because it is. For me, though, parenting babies and toddlers felt a lot simpler than parenting older kids feels. Still challenging, but more straightforward. (Though sometimes the straight way forward felt like it was up a really steep hill.)



*Though she later wanted to talk about it a lot (no, really, a LOT), and she wants to go back. Her general pattern is that she has to do things two or three times before she can actually enjoy the activity.
** If you want to talk about parenting a baby who hates sleeping, give me a call.
***There's also a LOT of acquisition of knowledge going on around here, on both kids' part, and that's super-fun. I know babies are learning an incredible volume of stuff, but they just don't share much of it with you. Dutch, on the other hand, tells us EVERYTHING she's learned, and, better yet, tells us about it as she's learning it. "Oh, Mom! So! 20 times 5 is 100, and also 5 times 20 is 100! Wow!!!!"

Republican presidential candidates would despair over Dutch.

Dutch is playing a quiet game this rainy* afternoon (Skipper is napping, so the household is in a pleasant state of calm) with a lot of beads. Apparently, some beads are getting married, and she's arranging them into groups and holding a wedding ceremony, etc. She showed me Mr. Brown and Mrs. Brown... and Mr. Brown. I asked if the second Mr. Brown was the brother of the first Mr. Brown, and she explained that the three Browns are married to each other. I said "That's not legal in most countries," and she said "Well, it's legal in Bead Country." and then she thought about it for a minute and said "Everything is legal in Bead Country, except hurting and killing beads."



*Fall has arrived. It's going to rain for six months now.

Birds. Bees. You know.

Dutch and I have had the Conversation. Remember that? Well, she doesn't. Yesterday, as we were chopping tomatoes  together, she mentioned (in the context of a conversation, not out of the blue) that she plans to adopt her kids rather than give birth to them. I nodded; she's talked about that before.* Then she said "Mom, how do you stop yourself from having a baby?" and I fumbled around a little bit. I talked about sperm and eggs and stuff. It was pretty vague. Finally, she said "But how will I stop my husband from mixing up his sperm and my eggs?" and I said "There are lots of ways. There's... Um. Well, it's a complicated subject, and I'm having a hard time explaining it in a way that will make sense to you. Do you want me to get you a book explaining it?" and she said "Yes!" and I said "Great!"

God, I love having a kid who can read.


*Seeing Skipper get born seems to have convinced her that growing your own baby is a foolish way to get a kid.

My Kid

I was trying to explain to a classmate of mine recently that Dutch and I have some wildly divergent tastes. Because I'm exhausted (and tend toward verbal diarrhea anyway), I ended up telling her that before Dutch was born, I would never, given a lineup of 5-year-olds, have identified Dutch as my kid. She's not what I thought I'd get. I was thinking, if I thought about it at all, that my daughter would be a more straightforward kid, a kid who would wear whimsically mismatched tomboy clothes and tackle the world with determination. A plucky kid. There's a kid in Dutch's class who's kind of the kid I expected and wished for. She has a funny deep voice and adorable short hair, and she barges right up to life and engages with it. I like her, but I'd rather have Dutch.

Dutch is just herself. Most of Dutch's obvious personality traits are very clearly inherited from various family members, but you could never have guessed which ones would turn up and how. Nothing about our girl is straightforward, but there are all sorts of strange little delights tucked away in all the twists and turns. Also, some of the things I loved about my imaginary child are pretty easy to align with my real child. For example, it turns out that baseball gloves can now be purchased in pink.*

Anyway, Dutch declared that she is going to be rich and famous, probably for writing a book, possibly for writing a play,** so we're going to live off her riches when she grows up. (Screw the imaginary kid - THIS kid's going to be RICH!) If she doesn't end up doing some sort of acting/dancing/whatever onstage at some point in her life, I will be surprised. She had to memorize a poem*** for her acting class, and she blithely performed it at "Music Time" for two classfuls of preK and K kids at her daycare. That takes some pluck.


*Title IX, I'm looking at you.
**She organized a focus group at her daycare for her classmates to help her flesh out characters and plot for the book she's currently writing. It seems that talking animals will be involved, and dumbwaiters.
*** Cook and I have perforce memorized it too, since she can't read. I am prone to talking or singing out loud to myself anyway, which makes for some embarrassing moments on transit, and now I find myself muttering "and guarding vast caches of GOLD!" in the hallway at school.

The grass, it is greener, in patches.

Our housemates have So. Much. Free. Time. It boggles my mind. Granted, they have even less enthusiasm for housework than we do, which frees up some extra time. But mostly, they have free time because they a) have only one job apiece,* b) are not in school, and c) have no children.

Lately I've been so exhausted and hectic that I've been babbling even worse than before, and frequently find myself talking incoherently and (apparently) unstoppably while the people around me look confused, or, worse, look anxiously around for some excuse to escape from me. One of my babbling topics last week was about how freaking hard it is to be in grad school while raising young children. I'm pretty sure that what I effectively communicated was "Don't have kids! Oh my god, don't have kids!" Living with Emma and Brendan reminds me daily of one big difference between having kids and not-having-kids, as they crash on the couch to watch a movie or read or chat after dinner while Cook and I scramble to get the kids to bed, prepare for the next day, and then report to our respective work stations. Free time. What is that, anyway?**

I love both of my incredibly burdensome children. But I want some free time. I can't believe how much free time I used to carelessly squander. What was I THINKING?! I used to play the Sims (a game Cook dismisses as terribly boring, but which I loved). I want the hours I spent playing that game back. It was a mistake, and I'm sorry, and I think I should get a do-over. I will take those hours now, added on to the 24 I get each day. I will be happy to spend them sleeping.

(I'm REALLY looking forward to being done with school, too. But school work can be put away for an hour, and a sad baby or a frustrated preschooler entangled in her swimsuit cannot.)

Tonight after dinner, Dutch and I started some seeds for our new vegetable garden. My tall girl, terribly serious about The Big Responsibility, standing next to me carefully counting out seeds and reading*** packet labels, didn't feel burdensome. She felt like my life. There's no second-guessing; my life has no computer games in it,**** no leisurely mornings, and very little coherent conversation, but it also has two lives nested inside it.

If you happen to talk to me in the next four months, I'm sorry about all the babbling.


*Though Emma is a union organizer who disappears into 120-hour work-weeks when she's on a campaign.
** Oh, right. It's the time I spend frivolously writing blog posts.
*** "P.E.A.R.... puh-eh-ah-rrr. Peru!"
**** just blogging.

This is definitely going to increase my site traffic.

Yesterday Dutch and I had The Conversation About Sex. You know, The Conversation. This is how we led up to it. Dutch didn't want to eat her soup. I said she had to eat soup before she could have bread and cheese. She asked me indignantly how I would feel if SHE made ME eat my soup before my bread and cheese. I told her that being an adult means making yourself eat the soup. I mentioned other things, like dental appointments, that I don't like but know I have to do. She said "I know another hard thing! Giving birth!" and I said yes, but that's a little different, and when you choose to get pregnant, giving birth is the only way the baby's coming out. She said, after a minute of thought "You don't want to have any more babies, do you?" and I said no, I will not have any more babies. She said, after several minutes of thought, "You mean you can CHOOSE not to have a baby?" and I said yes. And then she said "How do babies happen?" and I thought "Nooooooo!!!! I'm not ready!" and I got all flushed and shaky.

And then I explained.* I tried not to provide too much or too little information. Fortunately, I escaped having to explain HOW one goes about preventing pregnancy, and we completely left out the notion that people do actually like to have sex even when they don't want babies. We can get to all that later. However, it's also clear that she didn't get all the details nailed down, as she went straight upstairs and told Cook that "men put their penises in women's uteruses!"

Anyway. Later that afternoon, on the way to the library, we walked past a meth house that had been busted and is now closed for decontamination, with big yellow "DANGER" signs posted on the door. So Dutch and I talked about meth.** I wonder what we'll talk about next weekend - domestic program spending freezes?


*Egg, sperm, baby, choice
** Drugs, dangerous, hurtful, choice

Following up...

Yet another reason not to have more kids - fighting climate change one vasectomy at a time!

Reproduction

In my peer group, it appears that more and more people are having three kids instead of two.* Alpha Girl's mom, who has an older daughter as well, reported to me with amusement that not only is she often asked when she's going to have another child, but she's asked "don't you want to try for a boy?"

Um, no.

While we are not going to have a third kid (we can't afford it, and we're lazy, and really the last thing the planet needs is more people on it), I can understand the impulse. For me, the main draw is the science-experiment element - who's going to come out? I do love that part; it's really cool to see Dutch's personality unfold in all its scary glory. And there is something sad about knowing you're never going to have another baby. Maybe it has to do with facing mortality** - if you stop having kids, you must be getting old. Also, I'm ashamed to admit there seems to be some sort of competitiveness in it, at least for me - having fewer kids means you're selfish or wimpy.***

*USA Today says so, and I've seen it in my social circles as well. Therefore it must be so!

** And oh my god I just dicovered MY HAIRLINE IS RECEDING. Not only am I going to die, but I'm going to turn into an old man first.

*** True on both counts for me. Whatever.

Baby, baby!

Congratulations CM! (Also Emergency Man and BookYanker!) She's lovely!
Seems like there are lots of people in my life having babies these days, both first and second children. Trapeze Girl is expecting a girl this summer, Tiger is getting a sibling in October, and various other friends and acquaintances - two of my classmates, one of my former coworkers, etc.- are expecting as well. I'm very pleased, and also sad that I'll get to see so few of them anytime soon. I'm sure that when we do get to see them, they will all be best friends with Skipper.

One of my college housemates from senior year posted on her Facebook page that four of the six of us who lived together that year are having babies this year (including CM and me). The season of marriages was much more dispersed for my peers than the season of babies... I don't know why. Maybe we're all thinking that a recession/depression is a great time for reproducing.

Birth and death

First, here's an opinion by Judith Warner, from the Times (of course) about abortion and Dr. George Tiller.* People like babies (and pregnant women) because of their clean-slate-y-ness. Brand-new babies haven't yet shown us their human-ness. They haven't been petty or mean or cruel or stupid or boring yet. It's easy to forget that babies will grow up to be ordinary people, and it's easy to assign them all the good qualities they probably won't have. I think this irrational perspective is kind of necessary, from an evolutionary point of view, so we as a society will take care of babies as well as possible. But in the pro-life world, most of the time it translates into a sort of deification of unborn babies, and total neglect of babies/children/teenagers/adults after that clean-slate thing wears off. Which is totally crappy.

Second, on a semi-related depressing note, here's something I've been thinking about a bit. Near where I live in Portland, a woman recently threw her two small children off a bridge into the Willamette River in the middle of the night. The younger child, who was Dutch's age, died, and his 7-year-old sister was rescued. The comments on online articles about this mostly fall into the category of "she is evil, torture her and throw her in the river." We can have no idea what happened, really. The story is that she did it as revenge on her husband over a custody struggle. My personal narrative about it is about the power that parents have over our children. We are stronger than they are, they are dependent on us, and we are the center of their worlds. We can throw them off real and emotional bridges any time we like. But mostly... we don't. Even parents under terrible stress, with very limited resources, take this responsibility seriously. I think that's pretty amazing.

Last, here's a video Trapeze Girl sent me. I love the magic word the mother says!

Someday.

I dream about this. Is that bad, that I have a 6-week-old and a 4-year-old (and gosh they're so precious and I treasure every minute with them) and am already fantasizing about how fabulous it'll be when they're grownups? Dutch and I have talked about it, how she and Skipper will come over and have dinner at my house* and she will get things down off tall shelves for me (because we all expect she'll be at least three inches taller than me) and we will watch grown-up movies together. We're both really looking forward to it.

*For some reason we think I'm going to live in a house at some point.

postnatal

I forgot to mention how fantastic it is to not be pregnant. I slept on my stomach! I don't have heartburn! I don't itch! However... I still look 6 months pregnant. Dutch's friend Alpha Girl visted on Day One, poked my floppy belly, and said interestedly "Do you have another baby in there?"

Planning

I've been spending some time scheduling the birth in my mind, trying to identify the Best Possible Time. For example, we've got visiting family in town this week. Would it be better to give birth before they leave, so they could keep Dutch company and then meet the new baby? Or better to wait until after they leave, so as to get to spend more quality time with them? Do I want to give birth in the middle of the night? While Dutch is at daycare? 

(I am aware, in case you're worried about my addled dehydrated brain, that I can't schedule this.)

Reasons Next Week Would Be Better:

• My Chief Midwife is out of town for two days. 
  
• I'd really like to catch up on a few school things. 
  
• I haven't quite finished setting up the Giving Birth At Home Kit. 
  
• It would be nice to get this laundry done.* 
  
• I'm still feeling pretty weak and shaky.
  

Reasons Right Now Would Be Better:

• I'd really like to stop being pregnant RIGHT NOW. 
  
• It would be great to be back in action in time for some Big School Project events in the second week of May...
  

This waiting period is so strange. In three weeks, I could still be pregnant, or I could have a three-week-old infant. I tried to broach the subject with Dutch, explaining that the baby could be born any day now, but she clearly doesn't get it. It's a pretty hard concept for all of us. However, she declared "I am ready to be a big sister!" so I guess we're all set.

*There's been a lot of that, what with all the viruses circulating around here lately.

unwittingly duped by feminism

The other day, when Trapeze Girl and I were complaining to eachother about pregnancy, we mentioned how nice it is not to have to be pregnant 20 or so times and raise 18 children. This morning, Cook came into the kitchen, with an appalled look on his face, to tell me about hearing a radio piece about the Quiverfull movement. Being pregnant at the moment makes me even more fervently grateful than usual that I have been coopted by the feminist movement and therefore am not going to be pregnant for most of my life. 

I was thinking about this, as I washed dishes* and I considered that it must be a tremendous relief to subscribe to this sort of approach to life. You don't have to think at all, or make choices - you just have kids and try to keep them alive (and I don't know, pray a lot or whatever). You don't have to strive to find and do meaningful work, you don't have to navel-gaze. You just have to be pregnant and tending to children ALL THE TIME (plus housework), if you're a woman, and work all day (and fill out public assistance forms all night, probably) if you're a man.  It's all laid out for you - have kids, and raise them in some sort of Godly way, and you're all set. Not that I think this is easy - I can't think of many jobs harder and more exhausting than raising 20 kids - but it requires no consideration, no decisionmaking. You don't have to consider whether or not you're making the right decision with your life, because it just kind of unfolds automatically once you give up the birth control option, and you've already been told It's The Right Thing to Do. If you didn't have a lot of choices to start with, you can find satisfaction and pride in Doing The Right Thing just by having sex occasionally, and then dealing with the consequences. You can look at your children as righteous achievements of yours. Arrows in your quiver. If you had too many choices, you can find comfort in brushing them all aside and just Doing The Right Thing. You don't have to make any proactive choices at all.

My striving to find meaningful and useful (or at least not damaging) work in the world, which hasn't actually gotten me anywhere or made any change in the world, involves an awful lot of angst that I could just toss aside if I decided to Do The Right Thing and become a permanent baby-vessel.

However, I like this life much better, angst and all, even leaving aside the issue of spending my life gestating and nurturing and making huge vats of pasta.** I believe that we'd all be better off if we took a little more time for thinking. Absolute confidence that you're Doing The Right Thing is pretty dangerous.  Also, it's just creepy to think of your kids as your arrows. Dutch is so obviously not our arrow, and deserves to be considered as a person, not as a notch in Cook's Godly bedpost. To painfully mix metaphors. Anyway, I'm stereotyping and dismissing something I don't understand. But hey, so are the Quiverfull people. 

This morning I made a relatively solid start to my three days with Dutch. She woke up at 6 (because she didn't have to - she has an unerring instinct about this, and always wakes up at least half an hour earlier on weekends and holidays) and wanted to watch the sun rise with me. I crawled out of bed, knowing that if I didn't, she'd just drive me nuts and get really frustrated, and then I'd have to get out of bed anyway. And hey, a teachable moment! So we watched the sun rise, which this morning pretty much just meant watching the cloudcover get paler, and we talked about the solar system, eclipses, perspective, and anatomy. Then I made breakfast while she colored my old Anatomy Coloring Book for a long time and interrogated me about muscles, which nicely integrated science and art in the homeschool curriculum for the day. This kid is so freaking enriched! Really, even though we ignore her as much as possible, and let her watch videos and buy horrible plastic dolls at the thrift store, she's one of the luckiest kids with one of the most "enriching" environments in the history of human beings. All because I've bought into feminism and family planning.

*I've mentioned how much I hate washing dishes, right? At least I've only got three people in my family for whom to wash dishes!

** And washing a billion dishes!!!

knocking

Since I'm home due to Portland's inability to handle snow (daycare was cancelled due to PREDICTED SNOW), I'm surfing the internets. No, not getting ready for our epic holiday vacation. Not cleaning the house to prepare for the insanity of the next six months. The internets are way more fun.

Except also not fun. I blundered onto a blog called Knocked Up, Knocked Down, about pregnancy loss, and then onto a zine on the topic.  Reading these articles pointed out to me how hateful pregnancy can be for people who cannot get pregnant, or who have lost a child. One of my  friends expressed to me (in a nice way) some jealousy that I am embarking on my second kid, when she wants a kid more than anything.  I actually have experienced a faint shadow of this - when I see a pregnant woman, or a woman with more than one kid, I am jealous of them. Even though I don't WANT more than two kids, I have this weird reproductive jealousy. It must be hardwired.

But is is strange to know that now that my pregnancy is showing (though still muffled enough in fat that strangers hesitate to ask), I am a walking, complaining reminder for some people of the fertility that they wish for. With this pregnancy, as with the last, I try not to talk about it much unless I know I have an interested (or at least tolerant) audience, and I definitely avoid the smug-looking belly-rub maneuver. That's just annoying, regardless of the parenting/fertility status of the people around you. But... it's hard not to feel smug and excited about your tucked-away baby-to-be. It's hard not to reach out for the mysterious baby-to-be when it's wiggling around your insides.* It's hard to imagine how it would feel to lose a baby, to want a baby, and to have to watch other people gestating happily (or whinily) away.  Since I can't imagine, I think that the best I can do is pay attention, read the stories, not take anything about this pregnancy for granted, and not complain so much about how much I hate being pregnant. I'm lucky to have this pregnancy, with all its minor irritations, and I will be lucky to have a baby at the end. 

* Unless it's pretending your bladder is a trampoline, in which case you want to give it a timeout. 

Your questions, answered

Yes, I am fat, and I am also pregnant.

No, I'm not glowing.

It's due in April.

We do not yet know the gender.

We told Dutch several weeks ago, and she is Very Excited.

Yes, we're excited, too. Also, scared.

No, we have not decided on names.

No, we're not going to move.

No, I have no idea how we're going to fit another person into this apartment. Got any suggestions? We're considering a hammock-type sleeping system, old-school-British-Navy-style (less the floggings and rum, probably).

That's the news.

Abstinence Only?

This morning on the way to daycare/school/work, Dutch was drawing in the condensation on the window of the bus while happily talking to herself. Cook and I enjoyed the respite from the incessant questions, but I kept a wary eye on her, lest she draw or say something to offend the many many people squished in around us. (This is ALWAYS a danger on the bus - she's said some pretty awful things, which I cannot bring myself to write in a semi-public place.) After a while, she turned to us and announced that she was drawing a picture of "all my children's daddies."

Planning for the Future

This weekend, we had a houseguest, my Taekwondo Uncle, who was in town to take (and pass!) the test to become a third-degree black belt. Dutch loved every second of his visit, followed him everywhere, and even waited patiently outside the bathroom for him to come out. When he left in the morning, she went into our bedroom, crawled into the bed and cried. When asked why she was so sad, she said "I really miss Taekwondo Uncle!" She also got to see some of his test and attend a banquet of taekwondo-ers, which included a demonstration by a bunch of kids. She announced her intention to do taekwondo when she grows up "but I also want to be a real doctor. I will just do taekwondo so I can travel around. I will hit people, but they won't be able to hit me."

Congratulations, Taekwondo Uncle!