Toddler Phonics Funnies

Since I:

A) know that one of three readers of this blog is a speech therapist/pathologist/person who helps kids talk good, and:

B) am very much looking forward to hearing the ever-closer-to-words babbling of my niece in the very near future,

I wanted to re-post this story, as it made me laugh.

My friend Eddie (Ed? We called him Eddie in college, but now he's a husband and father and overall adult-type. Sir Edward, then.) writes an occasional blog about his growing family over at the Pluchar Baby Blog (this is one of at least FOUR blogs to which he contributes in his not-at-all-ample spare time).

So head over there for a chuckle. Sensitive readers be warned, there is one mildly explicit word used.

Mini-geek gets bullied, goes viral

When I was a little kid, I was a nerd.

Those of you who know me in real life know that not much has changed, but let's ignore that for the time being.

In fifth grade, I had glasses and crooked teeth. I laughed too loud, and I spilled my milk almost every day when we had our class snack break. Most of my clothes were hand-me-downs from my sister and cousins. I was into books that were ahead of my reading level and I got along better with boys than with girls.

So, like any kid who deserves it, I had a bully.

Most of the time, my bully said things that I didn't even understand: she made pop-culture references that I didn't get, and then she would laugh derisively at me. Sometimes she insulted me in ways that I figured just didn't apply to me. Occasionally, I could shrug her off. But her jabs and her soul-crushing laugh worked enough times that I can still remember the sting of it. I can remember her face when she laughed at me.

I had had another bully a couple of years before that - she was much older than me, probably 11 or 12. She constantly called me alternately fat or stupid. I was seven and I believed her.

No matter what I accomplish in my life, the voices and "advice" of those bullies can be conjured up in an instant. More often than I'd care to admit, I remember what they said and wonder if they were right.

It's cold comfort - OK, not even comfort, really - that both of them are fairly miserable people now. That doesn't make things any better.

So my reaction at a nerdy, be-spectacled 7-year-old girl being bullied by boys at her school for carrying a Star Wars water bottle was manifold: I logged on and left a comment of support for the kid, like almost 2,000 other people have already done, but I also found myself wondering if it's even possible to keep something like this from happening.

Kids are such jerks, man. And they're the worst to each other.

Aside from sequestering kids from each other, I don't know how to keep that sort of thing from happening. In the case of my experiences with bullies, there was never an adult within earshot - bullies know what they're doing is wrong, so they do it on the sly. And it's not like more supervision is the solution - kids need some space to learn and develop as social creatures. Katie's mom was savvy enough (and Katie is enough of a Star Wars fan) to pick up on something being off, but that's seriously a lot to ask of most parents. I was the third child and was already weird enough: how could my mom have picked up on some subtle change in behavior due to bullying? Did my behavior even change?

All's I know is, may the force be with Katie. And may I never get a hold of the kids who bullied her.

Well, shoot.

I'm wearing a sweater and I just updated all my calendars: it's November. Election Day is tomorrow and I'm going to vote because it's my duty as a citizen and especially as a woman - I think anyone who isn't a white, land-owning male in this country who "forgets" to vote needs to bone up on his or her history. Gotta exercise our rights, people.

Speaking of exercising rights as an American, I saw a billboard on the way home from Michigan yesterday that was advertising skeet shooting, and I thought, "I would really enjoy learning how to shoot a rifle at a moving target".

Then I spent a moment wondering why I had that thought.

Now, I grew up in a rural area, and I knew plenty of people who owned guns. Hunting season was a big deal back home - some high-school kids skipped school with their parents' blessing to go shoot deer. I recall entering a friend's garage in late fall and being faced with the sight of a fresh deer carcass hanging from the ceiling. My friend's older brother had shot the deer, and his parents were thrilled: for low-income families, deer hunting isn't just a hobby, it's a very affordable source of lean protein.

Guns, in the right hands, are tools that can be used to feed a family and cull overpopulation of deer herds. As long as people are educated about their guns and keep them unloaded and locked up around their kids, I have no problem at all with responsible gun use and ownership.

However, I can't say I've had much of an interest in using a gun before now.

A friend of mine here in Chicago had a similar impulse in her late twenties, and eventually she and her father spent a day out at a rifle range and learned all about shooting. She had a great time. Her husband was appalled by the trip, as they are both urban, liberal, crunchy-granola peacenicks. I thought it was a neat idea at the time - though not something I was interested in. Plus, a little outdoor father-daughter bonding is a good thing: I like to go camping with my dad. Heading to the firing range has its similarities.

As I was mulling through my new, more real interest in learning to shoot a gun, however, I remembered this: my friend who spent that day at a rifle range did so a few months before she became pregnant with her first child.

This morning I found myself wondering: as a woman of childbearing age, is wanting to shoot a gun a harbinger of other desires? Does interest in learning how to shoot imply a no-longer-latent yearning both to provide meat and to protect home and hearth... and, eventually, children? Perhaps craving firearm control is the first step toward craving midnight ice cream?

I want to ask my friend if she was thinking in those terms when she was shooting targets or clay pigeons. Because if shooting a gun is an early step to motherhood, maybe I should wait a little while on that trip to the firing range.

No, seriously, think of the children

I promise there were more pleasant topics about which I was going to post, but when I saw this article about a pertussis outbreak in California that's killed 10 babies so far, I almost threw up. So I'm writing about this.

If you were to meet me in person and we were to talk about vaccines and you were to tell me you weren't going to vaccinate your children, I would consider punching you in the throat. And then I'd probably go through with it. There's zero reason for people not to vaccinate their children - especially against highly lethal, completely preventable diseases - and there are many, many reasons to do so. Sadly, 10 more reasons just manifested themselves in California, and it probably isn't going to change anyone's minds over there.

Wow, schmei, get over yourself. You don't even have kids. Who gives you the right?

Good point. Allow me to explain:

My father was the youngest of 4 children. He had two sisters and a brother. Only, wait, he never met his sisters. They both died, several weeks apart, of pertussis, commonly called whooping cough. The older girl was almost two, and her little sister was only a few weeks old. Some infected asshole decided to stop by and visit my grandmother with her new baby and her toddler at home. Over the next few weeks she watched, completely helpless, as whooping cough killed them both.

The pertussis vaccine came out about 2 years too late for my two aunts.

My grandparents went on to have two more children - two boys - and I can't help but wonder how it affected my grandmother, to lose her baby daughters and then to have two boys instead. Maybe it was better, really, because they were completely different. I don't know. By all accounts she was a loving mother to her sons. Additionally, from what I've heard about her, she never really recovered from her daughters' deaths. She died young, and still heartbroken. Her sons were in their early twenties. They're both in their sixties now, and they don't really talk about it much.

Last year, my graduate program ordered me to get a pertussis booster, which I thought was annoying at the time. But I read more about it, and it turns out that in adults, pertussis vaccination can wear out over time. It's recommended to get a booster every five years or so.

I was very glad I had the booster before I met my newborn niece. And I'm glad my sister is completely reasonable about vaccinating her baby, because the study that claimed a connection between vaccines and autism was terribly flawed and has since been recanted. Sis is a scientist so she gets that... but it's information that really doesn't require a degree in physics.

Sadly, recanting that article hasn't stopped stupid people from refusing to vaccinate their children. What those stupid people don't realize is that it's not their own children they're killing, most likely it's other people's infants.

My 10-week-old teacher

I'm back from the various abysses that had consumed me!

As I mentioned here before, last week I stayed with my sister and brother-in-law and their 10-week-old daughter, my only niece, She of the Smoochably Chubby Cheeks.

I have what I had thought is a non-negligible amount of childcare experience: I started babysitting for a couple of local families when I was 11 years old (and got certified in a Red Cross Babysitter course. I earned a little lapel pin in the shape of a teddy bear for that class). I later worked for three summers as a camp counselor, wrangling groups of Girl Scouts in steamy Southern Ohio weather. I was trusted enough to teach archery, even - though the arrow points weren't all that sharp.

It might be fair to point out that I haven't done much childcare since I was about 17 years old - 10 years ago. I still think of myself as a high-energy person, but after last week I think I understand better why one of my co-workers insists (in jest... I think) that teenagers should be the surrogate mothers for the whole population, because they have the energy to manage babies.

People, a 10-week-old child is exhausting.

My niece is going through a bit of a fussy phase, and I had to remind myself many times that she has DOUBLED IN SIZE in two months, from a 5.4 pound newborn to a 10-pound, 4 ounce baby. I can't imagine what it must feel like for one's body to be doing that much growing and changing that rapidly - probably pretty uncomfortable, right? Of course. Hence the crying.

She's usually just fine if she's being held while someone is walking or bouncing or patting her back while talking to her. She's in the best mood if someone is doing all of that at the same time, she just ate, and her diaper is clean. This is all simple enough, but to do this routine for HOURS is tiring fairly quickly.

Her cuteness is a double-edged sword. One afternoon, when she'd just woken up from a nap (taken, like many naps that week, on me), I was playing with sunlight and shadows to entertain her. She can see contrasts now - dark colors catch her gaze, and she looks mesmerized. So I was moving my face into and out of the sunlight that streamed through the window. She quietly watched, rapt, while this happened, and then after a few moments of this she looked me in the eyes and smiled a broad, toothless smile. A look of pure joy.

Which made me cry.

Yes, it was Friday afternoon - the end of a long week of night shifts and diaper changes - but I think even if I wasn't tired I would have been touched by her smile. She's just beautiful: chubby cheeks (did I mention those already?), big blue eyes, button nose. When people compliment my sister on her beautiful baby, they're not being polite - she's quite lovely.

Which is why, when she's in the troes of a red-faced, clenched-fist, bloodcurdling screaming crying jag, it is deeply upsetting, but not in the way I expected.

My not-yet-in-love-with-this-baby self thought that her crying would be annoying because it's loud and I like my quiet, or it's in the middle of night and I like my sleep. She'd be an inconvenience when she cried. Once I spent some time with the kid, though, her moments of upset were disturbing on a completely different level, one that's hard to explain. She's done nothing wrong, she's an innocent babe, and she's suffering. I just want her to be happy - and I realized at some point that wanting her to be happy didn't have much at all to do with wanting ME to be happy. I found myself willingly changing pooey diapers because she tends to make a satisfied coo when her bum is clean and dry and newly be-diapered. The coo is cute, but it's also correct.

Does that make sense?

When she's smiling away it's like a corner of the universe is in proper order.

I think that's getting at it.

Children should be safe and clean and warm and loved - and they should know it. It's frustrating to be faced with a wee baby who can't know this yet: dozens of people love her immensely. Her parents are crazy about her. She's wanted and protected, but she'll only know this with time and the patience of all the adults around her.

When I described that smiling moment in the sunshine to another one of my co-workers, who is herself a mother, she said, "and that's the second you could have slayed any dragon, right?"

That about sums it up. I'd stop a train for that kid.

I thought I was being a bit histrionic, but fortunately Pioneer Woman helped me feel less crazy when she posted about her nephew recently here. A similar sentiment - she's not my baby, but at this point she's not not my baby. Sort of.

Quick update, May's a bust

I realized I was going to be "back Monday"... a couple of weeks ago. Alas.

I ran the 5K on May 1st in 35:09, which was pretty good. I ran the whole thing, no stopping except to hand off my completely unnecessary sunglasses to my husband halfway through the race. It was a perfectly drizzly day to run a race, and my knees didn't hurt much at all afterward, which is always the litmus test for a run.

Meanwhile, the month of May at my workplace is the busiest and certainly the most stressful month of the year, so the quietness of the blog will likely continue in to June.

I'm guessing I'll have all kinds of new stuff to talk about in June, however, as I will be spending the week of May 31-June 4th with my niece, who by that time will almost surely have doubled in weight since the last time I saw her. She's a great eater. She is apparently not a good sleeper at all, however, so I'm wondering which will be tougher on me: the busiest week of the year at work, when I'm responsible for 50 professionals for a 5-day training, or the week when I'm walking around the house at 3am with a screaming 9-week-old? I think I know where my skills lie, but I'm hoping I'm wrong. Regardless, this will be an introduction to the realities of life with a newborn: A life which, to be frank, does not sound at all appealing to me.

Maybe the week with my niece will help answer the question of why anyone would put themselves through such an ordeal. At least, a reason other than "Because people have no idea what living with a newborn is like until it's too late."

Unless there's some serious time to kill between sessions next week, so long until June!

Readiness

If you're one of the three people who read this blog, you probably already know this, but I thought I should clarify:

I'm a 27-year-old, happily married woman working on the tail end of a master's degree. Friends and relatives my age are all having kids. My husband and I are the kind of people you would probably call to babysit, as we are generally trustworthy and are at least good caretakers of our cat.

Thus, we get asked from time to time about when we're having kids. Or, occasionally, told: "You're not getting any younger". My mom just became a grandmother, so the pressure is off on my side of the family, but my mother-in-law, who I guarantee would be the Awesomest Grandma on the Planet, quietly pines for grandkids. And her youngest son - the one I married - is her only chance for those. (Ah, but a post about my two brothers-in-law is a whole separate topic. One I may never get to. They're nice guys, but they're not settle-down-and-make-babies kind of guys.)

So if there's the occasional post about kids - whether and when to have them, whether they completely destroy your life or only temporarily ruin it - don't be surprised. I am writing through my thoughts about this as they pop up. It's not you, I promise. It's me, and the people and events around me.

This consideration of motherhood is almost purely academic. I mean, it's emotional, too, because of factors like my mother-in-law (no, she really isn't giving me grief... but she adores babies, and kids in general, and the adoration is mutual) but I'm not dying to have a baby like some of my peers are. I find the process of pregnancy fascinating, and - there's no way to say this without sounding terrible - I'd be interested to try it. It just seems like nine to ten months of being geeked out by my body.

But the end of that process is something I'm - we're - not ready for.

I posted that inflammatory dooce post on my facebook page and asked my friends with kids what they thought of it. I was suprised by and grateful for the reaction I got. None of them agreed with her, not even a bit. Even my friend who's a single mom of two, juggling work, kids and school, said she thought the post was crazy. She noted that it gets overwhelming sometimes, but she needs down time with her kids to stay sane.

Certainly the best comment came from my older and wiser cousin who always comes through with great life advice. She wrote: "At 3 PM every day at work I long for my kids so bad it hurts. When I come home and they rush at me, it is so great! I love having time on the weekends to lay around and play with them, do puzzles, etc. I think this is a rant of a parent having a very overwhelmed moment and we all have those as parents, but it is not how you feel all the time."

She also noted, when I mentioned that dooce is on a lot of psychotropic meds, that the severe sleep deprivation that comes with caring for a newborn feels like you're on weird drugs anyway. She noted that when their oldest kid was a newborn, her husband asked her every day for a week if it was Tuesday. And he's usually a pretty with-it guy.

This is the same cousin who told me once, at her daughter's birthday party where her house was swarmed with kids and relatives and neighbors and noise, "Kids are so great... when you're ready for them."

That sounds nice. I'm so totally not ready.

Weekends

I need to tell you about my weekends.

Perhaps because I've spent more weekends than usual traveling this year, I've come to value even more the stretch between 5:00pm Friday and about 11pm Sunday, when I don't have a strict to-do list, I'm not in my windowless office and the only person I have to consult with about activities is, oh, my favorite person on the planet.

At this time in my life, the absolute best weekends are the ones that have zero outside obligations: no family gatherings, no weddings, nada. All those activities are fun, usually, but the Saturday that begins when the cat is head-butting me awake because she's out of food and I didn't set an alarm because I didn't need to are the best.

When faced with a wide open Saturday, my hubs and I always come up with some kind of plan. Often that plan involves rearranging some part of our one-bedroom apartment so it feels more open or works more efficiently. I usually try to sneak in a little cleaning, maybe do our laundry (which is a project because we either have to haul it to the basement laundry room - our building has 9 washers for 100 people - or we go mooch off a relative. We used to do laundromats, but they're not very fun) . I usually get some bit of housekeeping accomplished on a weekend, but the motivation isn't usually that I love cleaning, it's that starting Monday with a clean space is pleasant.

This past weekend was just one of those perfect weekends: No schedule. We moved furniture, washed windows, did all the laundry and the dishes, fixed our bikes after a winter in storage. This was over a two-day period: nothing was rushed. We spent just as much time lounging around, surfing the internet, drinking coffee, reading. We watched an action movie we've seen ten times, and we ate pizza. We got some gin, mixed a couple of drinks, admired the new furniture setup. Stayed up late and slept in late.

Our weekends manage to be lazy and efficient at the same time, but though I enjoy that, that's not really the point. Even if we do have hard work to do or we're heading to my in-laws or we have to go to a wedding or baptism or something, I look forward to weekends and the down time we have together.

I like weekends because I like the person (and the cat) with whom I live.

This reflection has come up because a post by Heather Armstrong, aka dooce, just bothered me considerably. Before anyone points out, "uh, Schmei, you know dooce is mentally ill and on a lot of medications, right?" Let me make it clear that I understand that. The post itself was just her being her neurotic self, I thought. Kind of entertaining, a little uncomfortable - her usual writing style.

But her commenters scared the bejeesus out of me.

Dooce's post - it's here - is all about how she hates weekends. Hates them. She can't relax because she can't work, and she gets all anxious without a schedule and starts cleaning everything compulsively. When I read the post, I thought, "I guess I could see that. If I worked from home I'd have trouble shutting it off for two days when my office is right there, too. Not everyone is able to do that..."

But there are two wrinkles. One is that she has two young children, and I know babies are terrible creatures to live with sometimes, and her six-year-old daughter certainly does not sound like a picnic either, so I guess I can understand her anxiety but I always thought weekends with kids could be nice. I guess I just assumed they'd be like weekends are for us now, only with an additional small person who can't eat pizza just yet and needs poopy diapers changed, and then later that small person might be doing something like playing outside when the weather's nice, but that would be fun, right? I love to get outside on weekends. I don't even mind soccer games that much.

Here's the other wrinkle - and this is the thing I should never do on anything besides this blog - I started reading the comments. And every. single. person. agreed with her. Weekends with kids? Suck. Across the board. They are a terrible period of constant suffering. There is no sleeping in, no enjoying coffee, no quiet time, NO FUN. Children with no routine flip out and abuse their parents, needling them constantly. They never shut up. They don't take naps. Things don't even start to pretend to improve until they're at least 10 years old, but then they're pre-teens and we know how awful THOSE are...

I am not kidding when I say those comments made me want to never reproduce in any way. Not even adoption, which, whenever I hear a horror story about childbirth, is my fallback position - "We'll just adopt!" - it's like takeout for babies. Who has time to gestate anymore?

Anyway, that post and those comments made me try to remember what weekends were like when I was growing up. Did I torture my parents when I was a kid? Sundays were fairly routine: church in the morning and then usually breakfast all together, the whole family passing around sections of the newspaper. I would always read the lame kid's joke aloud to Mom because I found her groan entertaining. (Sigh. I still love awful puns. They still make my loved ones groan.) Some Sunday afternoons Dad would go for a hike and take one or two of us along. Sunday dinner was usually something made of chicken, because it was a dinner with my family.

Did my parents hate that? I always thought Sundays were kind of nice.

Saturdays are harder to recall specifically because they were more nebulous. I do remember a time when all three of us were playing soccer, on different teams, at different places sometimes. I'm sure that was stressful, but once they got the transportation figured out it all worked out all right. And besides, that wasn't the whole day, just a couple of hours, usually, and then we'd all go home or hang out with teammates for a while or something.

I remember playing outside in sun or leaves or snow, or reading books. Entertaining myself, or playing superheroes with my brother. Or boardgames with my sister.

How bad was that? Was it that bad? It didn't seem bad, but I was a kid. Are kids that bad? Do they really ruin weekends? Can I never rearrange furniture with my husband again if we have a kid?

I suppose this is bothering me in part because, while I know plenty of women my age who have "baby fever," I don't really have it. What I would like is a child. Like, a seven-year-old, who will later be a twelve-year-old, and then a twenty-two-year old who I can take out to buy a suit for her job interview like my mom did for me. I would enjoy having a son or daughter, or one of each, or hell, two of each, and watch them grow up. It would be interesting to see what combination of traits kids would get, between my husband and me. I hope they get his mechanical smarts, even if that means they disassemble the thermostat. And they'll hopefully get his height, which will be nice for them... and for me, really. Once they're grown, I'll have more than one person I can ask to get things off high shelves. However, I kind of hope they get my hair. Because I am a vain person.

But I'm just not that in to babies. And the more I learn about newborns (my three-week-old niece, for instance, is both beautiful and a relentlessly demanding tyrant all at once), the less I want one of those. And the more I read articles like dooce's post, I find myself worried that the newborn stage never really ends. According to posts like that, newborns just morph in to kids who are potty trained, able to speak, and still just as awful to live with. If not worse.

All of those commenters sounded like my greatest fear about parenthood: they sounded regretful. And I hate that when I think about potentially being a parent some day, one of the questions I ask myself is "which would you regret more, NOT having kids, or having them and not liking them?"

That is a gross question.

I am happy with my life now. I've always kind of thought I'd be happy with kids, but posts like this make me worry that kids would ruin everything I love about my life, and then I couldn't take them back, and my husband and I would be stuck resenting each other and the little monsters we created for the rest of our lives together.

But there has to be a way to train kids to move furniture, right? Maybe that's all we'll need to do.

Shower forecast

As I mentioned recently, my only sister is expecting her first child in the spring. I happily volunteered to host a baby shower, and the invitations have gone out: it's happening in a few weeks. Since my sister and brother-in-law have chosen not to find out if the baby is a boy or a girl, and since I know that, even if she did know, my sister wouldn't want to have a party that's all pink frills or blue trucks, I'm aiming for a gender-neutral celebration of new life.

With the help of my creative taller half, I settled on a bird theme, in part because I found this adorable card stock:


(Um, I thought I was being clever, using this for a baby shower. Apparently that's the intended purpose - which I discovered when I did this image search. Whatever. My grandma still thinks it's cute.)

Something my sister and I share is a tendency toward being not the girliest of girls. We're both life-long Girl Scouts. We enjoy hiking in the woods and working in dirt (though her thumb is much greener than mine) and all that stuff. We are tentatively planning to do a triathlon together (there's another post for another time). I tend to hang out with guy-friends. She works in a very male-dominated science field.

All this is to say that meditating on a traditional, all-female baby shower hosted by me for her feels a bit off. On one hand, I very much want to celebrate what my sis is doing, and I think she's going to be a terrific mom. On the other hand, baby showers can veer into the creepy with a quickness, and I do not want to do that.

One baby shower I attended last year was so exhaustingly weird that I had to spend a full day recovering from it afterward. Honestly, I felt like I had a mild case of the flu. The games were so... awful. We had to sniff disposable diapers that had been filled with melted candy bars to determine what the candy had been. This might have been tolerable if it hadn't been the FIFTH activity we were put through (Decorate a bib! Do an icebreaker! Do a forty-minute-long celebrity baby match game! Guess a name! Eat these color-coordinated cookies! Go! GO! GO!!).

It was terrible. Then, when the expectant mother cried at the end with what I perceived as genuine gratitude for all the gifts and support (and, hey, maybe exhaustion at the end of a four-hour long gamefest?), some of the women laughed at her and made a crack about hormones. Huh?

I know.

So... I want to limit this event to one or two games that can serve as icebreakers, with an emphasis on eating good food and cake and enjoying the gift-opening. I'm trying to figure out how to carry the bird theme through the prizes and favors (if those Robin's Eggs chocolates come out before this shower, I'm in business!), and I'm considering which games would work best for the crowd. There will, of course, be a mix of people ranging from my shower-wary self to the "OMG LET'S PLAY GAMES" high school friend of my sister, but if she's disappointed, it's not her shower, right?

If any of my 1.5 readers have ideas for shower games that are actually fun, or prizes I should seek out, please share! As long as I'm not snorting faux-feces, it's going to be better than at least one party... but I'd like to keep the standards a bit higher than that.

Another OPB

Things are far enough along that I can write about this in my semi-anonymous blog: my older sister is expecting her first child in April.

This has been a strange and interesting journey for me so far, as the auntie-to-be: my sister is my only sister, and we look and sound similar enough, despite our seven-year age difference, to have been confused for twins in the past. Seeing the changes she's going through in her pregnancy make me wonder how similar my experience might be someday in the future.

My big sister has been very generous with information about the process of pregnancy, which I'm grateful for - there are so many things a woman just doesn't think to ask about these things, so many changes that make some sense, but that I could see not considering until it's my own body surprising me. Like with many things in life, my elder sister is learning from experience and then handing me the cheat sheet, telling me to file these things away until I need to know them. This is definitely the advantage of being the youngest sibling.

While I continue to appreciate the top-notch job my sister does of being a good sister, I am also - like always, when encountered with a pregnant woman - in awe of what she's doing right now. She is growing a person. And she is doing this while going about her days: walking the dog, going to work, taking a swim. She's been growing a person for 22 weeks now, every hour of every day. Women really are incredible in this way, and sometimes the sheer wonder of this capacity we have is a little overwhelming.

My sister was staying at our apartment a few weeks ago when she felt the baby move for the first time in a way that she could definitively tell (she had been feeling "gas" before, but she confessed that the whole pregnancy made her so gassy she wasn't sure what she was feeling! Another note for my future files). When she described the little "dum-da-dump" tapping feeling she felt, right at the front of her belly, I envisioned the tiny hand that played this rhythm, and was amazed. She's growing a person. As I type, even, she's still growing that person. That's... pretty cool.

Over this past weekend we spent a good deal of time with my husband's two new cousins. One is 6 months old, the other 5 weeks. When I was holding the 6-month-old and gazing at sparkling Christmas tree ornaments with him, I realized I had some trouble imagining a time when he didn't exist. I've heard people say this about children before, but this little trailblazer of a cousin might just be the first tyke who made me feel it: there was a whole family, a whole world before him, but now that concept doesn't make sense, because he's here.

I understand that the Mormons believe we all have "eternal" souls, that is, our souls were hanging around waiting to be embodied before we were born - it's part of the reason they have large families. It's not a belief I necessarily share with them, but when a 6-month old baby makes you confused about what life was like before him, it makes one understand where they're coming from.

It's a bit intimidating to think that, this time next year, I'll feel the same way - though surely with more intensity - about my new niece or nephew. Right now it's still hard to imagine my sister and brother-in-law with a child of their own, and myself as an aunt. Soon, we won't remember anything but that.

OPBs

Note: This is a quick post - I have a few in the hopper that keep growing, so I think a couple of multi-part series posts will happen soon.

I've been enjoying a strange version of baby fever.

On the day before a cousin of mine is scheduled to be induced (Best of luck, Mollie!), I've been thinking a lot about what we in our little household call "OPBs" - Other People's Babies - and how much I love them. Are you, or someone you know, having a child? That's great! Once said child has reached that stage where he or she can hold his or her head up, I'll be happy to babysit. Need someone to hold your 5-month-old for a moment while you do a quick chore? Count me in. Snuggly 10-month old? Yes, please. I will sniff that fuzzy little head with glee. Have a toddler? I am ready for goofy dance parties at any moment.

This morning we rode the elevator down to the first floor with a woman and her two sons who looked to be about 5 and 3 years old. The older boy had a small bike, and he explained with excitement to my husband that "We're going on an ADVENTURE with our BIKES! It's going to be SO SUNNY outside!"

We both smiled and told him it's a great day for an adventure. As we walked out of the building, we talked briefly about how our own someday Far Off In the Future babies will hopefully be so cute and enthusiastic about the great outdoors and bicycles, but those are conversations about Theoretical Events that will happen A Long Time From Now, whereas other people's babies are already birthed and fed and clothed by someone else! How convenient!

I'm fairly certain where the real craziness for OPBs got started: another cousin's redheaded son was born this past June, and he's one of the first babies I've gotten to really watch grow up. People, babies grow fast. Dude was just an intimidatingly delicate lump in late June, but by August his personality was really beginning to present itself. By the time I saw him a few weeks ago at a family party he was sitting up, quietly playing with my hands, reacting to the room around him, and - most striking - keeping tabs on his mom. Anywhere she moved in the crowded room, his gaze would follow.

That constant awareness of his mother's presence tells me that those "Other People" are pretty critical for Other People's Babies, and seeing the obvious bond that little guy has with his mother is both fascinating and daunting. When I think of the level of responsibility being a mom entails, I get a bit anxious... which is why I'm happy, with another new little cousin to hang out with in the very near future, to rest on my laurels as Cousin/Auntie/ Family Friend Schmei for a while longer.