Tag: babies

Here in Topeka

Sorry for the silence, folks.  I’m suffering from 80% disease:  I have about six posts 80% written, and then I say, “Yeah, that’s pretty much it — I’ll just go back and finish it up tonight.”  And then I dye my hair, change my social security number, and move to Canada so I don’t have to deal with it.

In the mean time, I offer you this Loretta Lynn song that my mother sent me.  I’ve never heard it before, but I love it!  It’s actually named “One’s On the Way,” but I didn’t want to title the post that, because then you would think I’m pregnant, and I’m not.

It seems like a pretty good follow-up to the March for Life, doesn’t it?  You know, that day when hundreds of thousands of ninjas march to show their support of women and babies.  I say “ninjas” because they somehow slip by the attention of the media — amazing!  It’s like they were never there.  And yet they get the job done.

Not everyone marched, but many hundreds of thousands stayed at home and helped the cause in their own way:

Here are the lyrics:

They say to have her hair done Liz flies all the way to France,

And Jackie’s seen in a discotheque doin’ a brand new dance,

And the White House social season should be glittering and gay

But here in Topeka the rain is a fallin’

The faucet is a drippin’ and the kids are a bawlin’

One of them is toddlin’ and one is a crawlin’ and one’s on the way.

I’m glad that Raquel Welch just signed a million dollar pact

And Debbie’s out in Vegas workin’ up a brand new act

And the TV’s showin’ Newlyweds, a real fun game to play

But here in Topeka the screen door’s a bangin’

The coffee’s boilin’ over and the warsh needs a hangin’

One wants a cookie and one wants a changin’ and one’s on the way.

Now what was I doin’ – Jimmy get away from there  – darn there goes the phone

Hello honey. What’s that you say – you’re bringin’ a few ole Army buddies home

You’re callin’ from a bar? Get away from there

No, not you, honey, I was talkin’ to the baby- Wait a minute honey, the door bell

Honey could you stop at the market and –hello? hello? well I’ll be.

The girls in New York City they all march for women’s lib,

And Better Homes and Gardens shows the modern way to live,

And the pill may change the world tomorrow but meanwhile today

Here in Topeka the flies are a buzzin’

The dog is a barkin’ and the floor needs a scrubbin’

One needs a spankin’ and one needs a huggin’ – Lord, one’s on the way.

Oh gee I hope it ain’t twins again

 

The blessings keep rolling in.

So I was sitting there, refusing to get up.  My six-year-old wanted a glass instead of a cup, the eight-year-old kept doing his evil laugh even though it makes him throw up, and the four-year-old wanted to tell me a story about how first, see, she forgot to flush, but then she suddenly remembered to flush, but then. . .

And remember, I have five other kids, too.

My husband is back at work after eight months of unemployment (and may I say:  heckova job, Barry), and I miss him.  It’s not just that suddenly, everything that needs to be done, said, investigated, cleaned up, controlled, and decided by an adult has to be done by me, me, all me.  I just miss having him around.  And I’m back to being surrounded by kids in a way that I wasn’t surrounded when there were two parents around.  The days are so long!

So despite my relief that he’s working again, I was feeling pretty mopey and despondent.  The kids were eating their stupid supper (in the fridge, waiting for husband, was ziti with chicken sautéed in olive oil with fresh garlic and basil.   The kids were eating naked noodles and poached chicken chunks.  That is a stupid supper) and I just wanted to sit down and feel sorry for myself, because I cut my toe on one of the plates the baby smashed while I was sautéing.

While I was fending off the needy ones, I read this little article from The Daily Beast(via Slate’s XX Factor blog):  I Refuse to Freeze My Eggs! (UPDATE:  Ooh, looks likeZoe beat me to it, and she chose the same quotes, too!)

The author is single and childless at 35–the age when, as she says, “all the petals fall off [your] vagina and dozens of cats suddenly park themselves in a circle around [your] cobwebby old hope chest.”  She’s enduring a gynecological exam, and her doctor starts harassing her to start freezing her eggs, just in case.

It’s super easy, she said. All you have to do is inject yourself with hormones a couple of times a day for about fourteen days, then you go to the doctor, and they scrape your eggs out of your body! Hopefully a few will be ripe enough to make a baby. They put those in the freezer. The rest are thrown into the river. I think that’s what she said. Something like that.

My doctor, who I adore, asked if I wanted to take home some “literature” about the procedure. (I never understand why these medical pamphlets are called literature, as if Faulkner was up all night feverishly writing about NuvaRing.) And in that moment, I made a decision. A decision about how I’m going to handle the fact that I’m thirty five (today!) and I don’t have kids and a kid-making partner isn’t currently on the scene. I decided I didn’t want the literature. And I don’t ever want the literature about anything related to the world of Fertility. It’s my big thirty-fifth birthday present to myself.

I’m sharing this story with you for two reasons:  first, because it’s refreshing to hear a (presumably) secular woman say what she says:

[W]hen I think about my uterus (which is rare) I don’t have any desire to bully it into doing something it may not naturally feel like doing. In vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, egg transplants, surrogacy, fallopian Xeroxing—I have no interest.

Hear, hear!

The second reason is to share with you my delight at an unexpected benefit of having all these little kids around.  I mean, I’m used to all the regular blessings:  always surrounded by love, the peace and serenity of being open to God’s precious gift of life, the constant howling, and so on.

But it never occurred to me that there’s something else:  even though I, too am 35 years old, no doctor ever, ever tries to push me into freezing my eggs.  I think I have my twenty-seven  children to thank for that.

Also, around about the time you have your fifth baby, the doctor stops trying to sneak a plain cardboard box of condoms into your hospital bag.  They’ve given up.  They think you’re an idiot; you know you’re an idiot.  Everyone’s happy, and no one tries to talk you into anything when you already have your feet up in stirrups and can’t fight back.

See what I mean?  Children are a blessing, and the blessings keep rolling in.

7 Quick Takes: “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” Edition

Many mothers of big families are at a loss for words when strangers make personal comments about their family size.  Other women are able to use their conspicuous presence in public as a chance to witness to the joy of this lifestyle.   Still others see it as an opportunity to ditch one or two of the slower kids in the crowd.

No matter which description fits you, there will come a day when you are urging an unruly string of children down the narrow hall of the hospital, where you are late for an appointment to have the blood of several of them painfully tested for something you know perfectly well they don’t have.   Some of them will be licking the walls, one will be wailing about losing her vending machine puppy in the parking lot, and two will merely be going silently boneless.

It is at moments like these when some sweaty bozo in an AC/DC T-shirt will appear, plaster himself comically to the wall to let you pass, and remark, “Haw haw haw, looks like someone don’t have a TV!”

 

(photo source)

So the following guide is for you, mom.  If one of your damn wiener kids hasn’t shoved a fig newton into the printer, feel free to make a copy, laminate it, and keep it in your ludicrously enormous purse.  It will help you respond to people who see your presence as a challenge, when really all you want to do is mail a letter, buy some diapers and few pregnancy tests, or pay the librarian for the books you ruined this week, and go home.

7 Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions About Your Big Family

 

–1–

Boy, you’ve got your hands full, don’t you?

Congratulations!  As the ten billionth person to make this clever remark, you are a winner!  As your prize, please accept this delicious baby.

–2–

Don’t you know what causes that?

Yes, it’s brought on by being in the presence of morons.  Every time I leave the house, I feel the urge to rush home to my husband and, for the sake of future generations, try to outnumber people like you.  Whoopee!

–3–

Are those all your kids?

Quiet, you fool, my husband’s listening!

–4–

How many kids do you have, anyway?

I dunno.    [I don’t know if it qualifies as snappy, but it’s often true, and it shuts people up.]

–5–

You’re stopping now, right?

Of course!  Lots of people have eight kids.   Eight kids is nothing.  Of course, our van is longer than most people’s driveways.  We own two milch cows just to supplement breakfast.  And with the money from our Additional Child Tax Credit, we bought a Learjet.  That’s life with eight kids.

But to consider having nine kids?  That would be cuh-razy.

–6–

[This next one is for kids who are members of big families.  It’s a direct quote from lunch recess at Disnard Elementary School, and partially explains why no one liked me in sixth grade.]

Hey, huh huh huh, you have seven brothers and sisters?  Boy, huh huh huh, your parents must really like to dooo it!

Yeah, boy, I guess that proves they had sex eight times.  And you’re an only child, so I guess your parents just don’t love each other very much.  Ha ha!  Now, who wants to be my lunch buddy?

–7–

Don’t you have a TV?

If you think TV is better than sex, then you are doing it wrong.

————————————————————————————————

So long until Monday, folks! Don’t forget to check out Conversion Diary for links to everyone else’s Seven Quick Takes.  And don’t forget the most basic rule of appearing in public with lots of children:  it’s everyone else’s job to get out of your way.

Thursday Throwback: the one with the hamburger in the washing machine

Jane (The View From the Foothills) gave me a lift by asking,

Is there any chance you could re-publish your story on defrosting the hamburger in the washing machine.  A very good friend of mine is about to have her 4th child and I would like her to have a  fabulous laugh.  That story, which I passed along a lot when your old blog was up, has kept many friends laughing over their life with a newborn mistakes, “Well, it wasn’t quite hamburger in the washing machine but I ……”.

Well, I am happy to oblige, and even happier to post something I don’t have to write!  So here it is:

The Hamburger In the Washing Machine One

The baby, with her Svengali eyes,

hypnotized me into believing that she was sleeping through the night.

We would solemnly put her into her bed promptly at 9:30, and she would sleep until 6 AM.

After several nights of this, I would actually be in tears by morning, unable to believe that it was already morning again, and sleeping time was all over, and why was I so tired, when the baby was sleeping through the night?

Sure, she would get up for a little snack when we came into bed and disturbed her; and occasionally, when she has a cold, or was fighting off a cold, or recovering from a cold, she would need to get hydrated; and all of us, including babies who can’t tell time, were a little confused by daylight savings time; and as long as the sun is almost up, or almost up, that counts as breakfast time. And of course she’s often teething. Butbasically, she was sleeping through the night, I would say.

For as much as two hours at a stretch, all through the night.

I couldn’t make toast without consulting the recipe. I would try and start the car when it was already running. I would use “thing” to substitute not only for nouns, but for any part of speech, as in: “Could you please thing this thing in the other thing over there? Yes, you. Thing with the red thing on.”

And of course I lost things — school books, hot cups of coffee, children . . . you know, things. I spent a good half hour hunting for a misplaced bag of parsley, which couldn’t have roamed very far from the soup pot of origin, could it? By sheer chance, while searching for my keys, I discovered the parsley tucked safely inside the dishwasher, where, oh yeah, I put it because, um, because of some reason, surely.

In light of this mental disintegration, my husband suggested that the baby might sleep better across the room, where she can’t easily see, hear, or smell me. She can still be nice and close in case an eagle breaks into the house and I need to be there for her, but a little distance will encourage her to quit sucking the life force out of me night after night.

Well, it worked. She now sleeps from 9:30 to 7:30 — for real, as in remaining quietly in her crib, and waking up happy and hungry. She’s been doing this for almost two weeks. I’ve been getting 7 or 8 hours of sleep, day after day . . . and I’m still stumbling through my life like a amnesiac with autism and a death wish.

Yesterday I lost three-and-a-half pounds of ground beef. Where could that meat be, where could it be? The previous day, I had forgotten to take it out in time to have hamburgers, but left it out so that, if I forgot again the next day, it would at least be partially defrosted. But then I forgot to put it away. So where was it now?

So I asked my husband, who knows me, What the hell did I do with that meat? and he had an inspiration: maybe it’s in the washing machine! In fact, it must be in the washing machine. That’s where I put it to defrost, because — I dunno, to make room in the refrigerator for some laundry?

Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I know you were looking forward to reading about how I didn’t notice that the meat was in the washing machine until the horrible, gristly disaster was complete — how I let all the cycles run, including “agitate,” which is very hard on chop meat — how I didn’t even notice how oleaginous the wet clothes were, even though all the hundreds of tiny drainage holes were each stuffed with a wad of raw, soapy hamburger — and chunked the whole meaty mess into the dryer, and of course set it to “high heat,” and how now my husband will be getting sock jerky for lunch and hamburger khaki casserole for supper for the next few days, which is not covered under the warranty.

Nope. All that happened was that I located the meat while the washer was only half-full of water and soap. The situation was saved before any kind of whirring, churning, or centripetal force came into play.

The worst part was that the blood leaked all over the clothes; but if you think about it, that’s really pretty good timing in a bad situation. It’s like breaking your leg in the lobby of the hospital, or punching your brother while in the confession line.

Well, at least that hamburger got defrosted. And clean! (Yes yes, I threw it away. It sat out for 36 hours, was sopping wet, and smelled like a combination of a mountain breeze and warm, wet meat. We’re just going to have to eat socks or something tonight.)

So that’s one mystery solved: I did find the meat. But where did I put my brain? Now let me see, I was using it to correct some math the other night, and then I put it down somewhere . . .