Oh so quiet

This must be what it was like when Kid One was a baby.


It’s quiet in the house.

There’s no TV, no Wii or Playstation, no texts pinging back and forth. I can hear the birds in the tree outside my window.

Today is the first day of school for Kid One and Kid Two. Big T and I (and now Baby Three) both went to drop them off, but there’s no more going in with them and seeing their teach and helping them find their desks.

Kid One – now in seventh grade – hopped out of the car almost as soon as it was in park and said she see us after school. Kid Two and walked to the door fourth grade enters, and I waited until the bell rang to make sure he got all his school supplies inside. Then I said hello to a few parents and went back to meet Big T and Baby Three in the car and we stopped for a cup of coffee on the way home.

When Kid One was this age, the end of summer didn’t mean any more than a change in the weather. No one was going back to school.

When Kid Two was this age, it was a big, big change for him – his big sister was suddenly gone all day.

For Baby Three, it’s more complicated. Her big sibs are often gone, even in the summer, and there were plenty of summer days when both were at camp, although there were also lots of days when one or both was home.

When the are “home,” it often means that we are all on the move. Yesterday Baby Three and I took Kid Two for his back-to-school haircut, then took him to a hockey conditioning session.

That’s another change; when Kid One was a baby, I don’t think I ever would have taken her from the warm summer air to spend an hour in a chilly ice rink. With Baby Three, I just brought some fleece pjs to put on her while Kid Two suited up, then held her close to me in a sling so she wouldn’t get cold.

Everyone talks about how parents are so much more careful with first children, sterilizing pacifiers and whatnot. That’s true, to an extent. I don’t think I would have been so calm removing dog toys from Kid One’s mouth as I am with Baby Three (and gently reminding Kid Two that everything goes in her mouth, so please don’t give her the dog toys).

But for the bonus baby, life is much busier than for first children or even those whose siblings are still young. In some ways, I think it is also richer.

The Haircut

Kid One got her hair cut yesterday.
It's a lovely bob, between her chin and her shoulders, very stylish and very easy.
For us, this was a big deal.
Pre-haircut, her think, wavy hair spilled more than halfway down her back. When it was clean and brushed, it was beautiful.
But it was hard to maintain. Kid One has lots of hair, and with it being so long, washing it was difficult for her to do by herself. If we washed it at night, it would still be wet in the morning. If I tried to blow dry it for her, I felt like my arm would fall off before it was done.
Brushing it had a way of setting our mornings off on the wrong foot. She would make a valiant effort, but she couldn't get the layers underneath combed out. If she did it herself more than one day, it would develop snarls that could be compared to the Gordian knot. So most mornings I would brush it, and I would start to hear the litany of "Ouch! That hurts, Mom! Are you almost done? You're hurting me!"
Keep in mind that I was never trying to hurt -- only to get her hair brushed as gently as possible before school or camp or wherever she had to be. So my litany was, "I'm sorry. I know. I'll be done when I stop brushing."
For the last several months, she's been talking about getting her cut. She's looked at styles and decided to do it and decided not to do it.
Finally, it was time. She wanted it done before school starts on Wednesday, so off we went to the salon.
The stylist looked at the pictures Kid One brought with and made a couple of suggestions to make them work with Kid One's face, then braided her hair into four thick plaits and snipped them all off and handed them to me.
Then she got to work on a style that can be blown straight and curled under, or allowed to dry in its natural waves. Brushing time is minimal.
Kid One looked a little nervous in the chair, but smiled when it was done. She keeps looking in the mirror, like she's seeing something else, and swinging her hair around. "It's so freakin' weird!" she said.
And as soon as we got home, she made me throw away those four braids. She was ready to move on.

Nursing with the big kids

A week or so after we brought Baby Three home from the hospital, my sister sent me an invitation to a Facebook group called something like “If you don’t want to see a baby nursing throw a blanket over your head.”

I laughed and clicked the “like” button.

I have nursed all three of my children, and it seems to have done all of us good. I know that it doesn’t work for everyone, and it was not always easy or pleasant – especially with Kid One, when neither one of us really knew what we were doing at first – and it is time-consuming and tiring. But the rewards, to me, make all the time and the occasional pain more than worth it.

Because once you get the hang of it, it is pleasant. It feels good for me and the baby. It gives her the nutrition she needs, nutrition made just for her, and it makes me sit down for a time and just hold her close.

I’ve also never seen the point of hiding away to feed my babies; especially at the beginning, when they want to nurse all the time, that would be really isolating.

But I’d also never nursed a baby with a 9-year-old boy in the house. I wasn’t sure how that would go.

Turns out, I needn’t have worried. Somewhere around the time my sister sent me that Facebook invitation, Kid Two—the 9-year-old—said to me, “I thought it would be weird having the baby feeding from you all the time. But it’s really just normal.”

And we went on with our lives. Baby Three has nursed at youth hockey games and minor league baseball games, in restaurants and parks, in the car, you name it. It boggles my mind to hear about mothers being hassled for nursing in public. It’s never happened to me with any of my kids. I’ve gotten a few strange looks, yes, which I’ve simply returned until the other person stopped staring. I have been offered more private places to nurse, if it would make me more comfortable, which I generally decline politely.

Don’t get me wrong—I try to be discreet about it, and I’ve found that if I don’t make a fuss, most people don’t even notice what I’m doing. At home, Kids One and Two often have to ask if I’m nursing Baby Three or just holding her, because it can be hard to tell. But yes, my son has seen my nipples when I’m getting Baby Three latched on or taking her off. No, he doesn’t seem embarrassed by that. I’m actually a little proud that he will grow up with the knowledge that women’s breasts serve a real purpose. Maybe it will make him a tad more respectful as he goes through adolescence.

Now that Baby Three is closing in on seven months, we actually nurse in public less and less, not because of any embarrassment but because she is so tuned in to the world around her, it’s hard for her to focus on nursing with a lot of other people around. I find myself shooing Kids One and Two out of the bedroom when I’m feeding her in the interests of getting some milk in her in a reasonable amount of time. Otherwise, she keeps stopping to look at them. She seems to be trying to make them laugh; when she succeeds, she laughs, too.

Dreams of greatness

I asked Kid Two – the boy – if he wanted to try out for a competitive travel baseball program. Truth be told, I was hoping he would say no.
He loves all things sports-related, and we do our best to encourage him to play. He’s a naturally well coordinated kid, and does well in most sports where size is not a huge advantage. Huge he’s not.
But I think 9 is a little young to make a year-round (or almost year-round) commitment to a sport, and that’s what this would have been. Fall league games and practices. Winter indoor instruction. Spring and summer leagues and practices.
And, from Kid Two’s perspective, there probably wouldn’t be time for hockey.
Hockey at any level also requires a commitment; after all, hockey skills such as passing, shooting, stealing all have to be done while skating. That means lots of time practicing, and practicing at an ice rink.
But at the level at which Kid Two plays, the commitment is limited by the length of the season. It’s a long season – September to March – but it does come to an end, and it is possible to participate in a recreational baseball league when hockey comes to an end.
Anyway, Kid Two said no to the baseball program for this year. But he wanted to leave his options open. Maybe next year, he said, if he has a bad year in hockey and a good summer in baseball. He’s got to make a choice eventually, he said. You can’t grow up and be both a professional hockey player and a professional baseball player.
He’s on the cusp of the age when reality sets in; it won’t be so long before he realizes that very, very few people are professional athletes in any sport.
I’ve watched Kid One start to realize that she will most likely never be a pop star. After all, she’s 12, and Disney hasn’t discovered her yet. She also will never be an Olympic gymnast or figure skater, although I don’t think she seriously ever wanted to be.
As adults, we tell kids they can be whatever they want. Sometimes it comes as a bit of a rude awakening when they realize that they can be whatever they want – within limits. Most important to me is that they are people of integrity, who know that happiness comes not from personal pleasure, but from rich relationships with other people. The rest is icing on the cake.
In the meantime, Frank doesn’t have to decide yet between baseball and hockey. And who knows? If he makes it to professional baseball or hockey, I’ll be there to cheer him on.

In defense of real glasses

There's something about a real drinking glass. It's smooth and heavy. When filled with iced tea or water from the refrigerator, it's pleasantly cool to the touch. When you put ice in it, it makes a satisfying clinking sound. And it never tastes of plastic.
I recently rediscovered the pleasures of real glassware. For at least 11 years, since Kid One started drinking from cups, we have been a plastic house. First the plastic cups that come with restaurant kid meals, and then souvenir cups from the zoo. Now it's mostly souvenir cups from sporting events -- White Sox, Cubs, Bears, even the Gary Railcats. Over the years we've even used and reused plastic party cups.
Plastic makes a certain amount of sense; it won't break and it's light enough for small children to control easily. That's why they use it for sippy cups (at least I assume so).
But even though we still have one in diapers (and are a long way from seeing the end of that), Big T, my husband, made the move to real glass earlier this year. This summer, I joined him.
Drinks, even the non-alcoholic kind, taste better. Sitting down with a tall glass of something cold feels more like a break from routine; it encourages sipping, not swigging.
So here's to drinking from real glasses. Maybe next year we move on to cloth napkins.

Tired? Who's tired?

When people find out we had a baby nine years after our next-youngest child, they can't seem to resist joking about how tired I must be. They seem to want to relive their baby-days, looking back at what they recall as endless sleepless nights with what I can only think is schadenfreude.
The truth is, I am tired. But not necessarily because of Baby Three.
While some babies never want to sleep through the night, she's been enjoying seven to eight hours straight of peaceful slumber since she was about three months old. Sure, there are occasional night disturbances. I chalk them up to teething, or growth spurts, or whatever other nebulous cause comes to mind.
But by the time she's ready to sack out -- usually between 9 and 10 p.m. -- I'm about ready to join her.
Unfortunately, that's about the time my 12-year-old, Kid One, comes awake and wants to talk or walk or the dog or do anything but think about going to bed.
I know lots or research shows that adolescent brains are just wired to keep later hours, staying up late at night and sleeping later in the morning, and she's entering those years. I know she's not trying to make me feel bad for having to stifle yawns as she tells me about the plot of the book she's reading, or the latest friend drama, with nearly every sentence ending in "y'know?" in an attempt to keep me paying attention.
I feel like I should apologize for being tired, for not being grateful that she wants to talk to me at all these days. Then I remember when I was about her age, and my mom had just had a baby and made a nightly habit of falling asleep on the couch before 10 p.m. Now I know where she was coming from.
And I remember saying to my mother after Kid One was born, "Does this mean I'm going to be tired for the next 18 years?" She was one of those never-wants-to-sleep babies.
My mom said, "I think it's going to be longer than that."

Bonus Baby

As I type, Baby Three is on my lap, alternately grousing and sucking her fingers. At almost seven months, she has quite a lot of catching up to her brother, sitting on the couch eating strawberries, and her sister, lying on the couch reading.
Baby Three was quite a surprise when we found out she was coming; my husband and I had always wanted more, but they never came along, and after more than eight years, we thought we were done having kids. People make strategic plans and God laughs, and we ended up with a bouncing baby girl, squeezing a fifth person into our small, barely-three-bedroom apartment.
She has changed our lives in ways we never could have imagined. Now we inhabit multiple worlds: two working adults, one self-employed at least part time; a tween girl, who embraces drama as her natural way of expressing herself and considers the disarray in her bedroom an ongoing work of performance art; a sports-crazed boy, who seems to take to any activity that involves hitting a small projectile with a long stick (hockey, baseball, golf); and Baby Three, who gets hauled from school drop-off to hockey practice to rehearsal and never seems to miss a beat.
Life certainly more disorganized now, but I wouldn't trade a minute.