Signs of singletons

No, I didn't take this picture. Are you crazy?

Two earnest young mums huddle over a table in the coffee shop this cold January morning. One, young and brown-haired, is carefully cuddling and nursing her tiny child, leaning forward to listen to her companion, a tall lady with a long blond ponytail, juggling her child, who, given what I remember about child development, is somewhere between eight and eleven months old.

Clearly, both have just the one child.

How can I tell? Something in their posture, in the intent focussing of their attentions on the babies. Also the fact that they're sitting in a coffee shop.

Some time later, I make my way down the hall to use the tiny loo. Blond Ponytail is crouched in one of the two stalls. Her baby is balanced on the adult seat, and BPM is reading from a pile of picture books, while the little girl-child makes noises of the kind a baby makes in the months before words come.

I've heard something of this phenomenon. It's called something like "elimination communication", because young parents simply don't have enough to worry about. With this method, you prove how much at one with your kid you are, by carefully watching your baby for signs that s/he might be ready to pass something, then popping them on the adult toilet until whatever it is emerges. This way, you not only wipe out the need for diapers, but you also get yet another opportunity to bond.

Blond Ponytail Mum bonded with her preverbal daughter, all during the time I used the free cubicle, and for some time after that. Luckily for her, it seems that no more than one woman at a time needed the facilities during that period. Definitely the mother of one. Imagine a mother of two or more believing this was necessary for her baby, much less leaving the other(s) unattended for the amount of time each toileting takes.

Mind you, BPM is probably waaaaay too environmentally conscious to have more than one child.

(For the record, I used cloth diapers, but would probably be condemned for my water wastage.)

The Second Child

With Mother's Day bearing down upon us, if you'll pardon the expression, it seems that the media is brimming with items on the life-changing event of having a baby.  Some years ago, there was a particularly cloying and sentimental ad from a nameless manufacturer of disposable diapers that featured a new mom burbling about giving birth:  "It was the ultimate experience of my life!!!"  (Really, lady?  How unfortunate for you and your motherless child.)

What no one seems to discuss is the fact that the child that will change your life irrevocably is the second one.  With one child, you can still hang on to vestiges of your old life; you can pursue sports and hobbies, and your friends will stay your friends, to whom you will be "Bart, Miriam and little Jasper". With Child Number Two, you become "Bart, Miriam, and The Kids", your child-free friends will float from your life, and you will not have the strength to woo them back.  You may not even realize that they have gone.

Another hazard of moving from a one-child to a two-child family is dealing with the assumptions that you know what you are doing.  One assumption comes from yourself:  "I have a kid, right?  I know what I'm getting into."  No, you don't.  Child Number Two (and every subsequent child, should you be foolhardy enough to continue) will differ in every way from Number One; everything that worked with the first kid will fall flat.  Children aren't just children; they're individual human beings.  I was what they called a "home support worker" in my misspent youth and I was often sent into help mums with a new baby.  Whether it was Baby Number Three or Baby Number Six the cry was the same:  "None of the others was ever like this!"

The other assumption comes a wee bit earlier.  It is assumed that if this is your second pregnancy that you remember what to do.  I don't know about you guys but I had a severe case of porridge brain throughout my first pregnancy and thus had very little to go on when I got knocked up the second time.  Oh, both children were planned;  what I mean is that I was very nearly as clueless the second time around.  The fact that there were four years between my daughters didn't actually help.

Plus, of course, just as every child is different, every pregnancy is different.  So the months, weeks, days and hours before younger daughter entered our lives sixteen years ago were full of surprises.  Like gestational diabetes, for example.  I was informed, as my third trimester began, that my blood sugars were elevated "slightly" and that I would be going in for nutrition counselling.  By the end of the morning, they were showing me how to inject myself with insulin.  "I feel like the bloody Balkans," I protested.  "First I was a border skirmish, now I'm a global crisis.  What gives?"

Things got even more fun when I was required to go in to the hospital (two-hour round trip bus ride) for weekly "non-stress tests", usually followed by a one-to-four-hour wait for a brief consult with an obstetrician who informed me with grim delight on one occasion (he was a rather grim man) that I was dilated 3 centimetres, so he merrily stripped my membranes.  Never said what he was doing, of course, just left me recovering from what had seemed to be one hell of a rough pelvic exam.  I was wiping the cold sweat from my upper lip when I noticed the blood on the examining table.

And so on through hours of induction culminating in an emergency C-section in the wee hours of the morning (I could have told them that was coming), then a spinal fluid leak from the epidural, resulting in headaches whenever I sat up, resolved by sealing it with a blood patch. Golly that hurt.  Oh, and did I mention the rigour?

And yet? And yet.  The most danger I was ever in of having more than two children was when I gazed at the ineffable beauty of my second-born.  I thought the beauty of my first-born was a fluke, you see.


I'll shut up now before I start to sound like an insufferable commercial for disposable diapers.  (For the record, I used cloth.) 

Party Rats

My horoscope for this week tells me, rather sagely I think, that it will be an up-and-down week and whatever happens is going to happen. However, we can choose our choice of response. This is where we have control in our lives. I've been getting quite a taste of that already and today's a Full Moon so heaven knows what may happen by day's end. I figure if I'm going to blog on the positive, I better do it now...

I succeeded in surviving younger daughter's party. I planned it. I organized it. I ran it. And I did it while pre-menstrual.
Twelve little girls attended, not including birthday girl. I've taken up the rash policy of inviting all the girls in younger daughter's class, with the idea of skirting little-girl-class-politics. This policy seemed less rash two years ago when there were nine girls in the class. There are now seventeen. So I sent out the rather fiddly invitations two weeks ago and waited for responses, half-terrified that I'd only get two (which did happen three years ago when younger daughter was at her previous school), and even more terrified that all seventeen would accept as we usually only get one refusal per year. This year we got four, one last-minute due to a family emergency. Also three last-minute acceptances accompanied with profuse parental apologies and they'd been so busy... And no one else is? Actually, my favourite was from the single dad (not that this is relevant) who told me he was sure his daughter had passed on the acceptance at school. (To whom? The over-worked teacher who knew nothing of the party? My daughter with her memory challenges? What did he think the phone number and email on the mailed invitation with the letters RSVP were for?)
Anyway. We had a Ratatouille party. With real ratatouille. I found two simple recipes, chopped up the ingredients, bagged them and labelled them "Ratatouille 1" and "Ratatouille 2", divided the girls into teams, and crowded them into the kitchen in our semi-detached, where the team captains were passed the baggies to sauté in two saucepans. We then played a kind of team Pictionary game where they drew collages of song lyrics and had the other teams guess while the stews simmered. The girls did a champion job and we had ratatouille for dinner for two nights. I called the activity "Rate-atouille" and the first recipe won out marginally over the second. I think only half the girls volunteered to taste it; the rest tackled "egg-rats" (which you can see in the bottom of the third picture), veggies and dip, crackers and French cheeses, and of course, totally demolished the various bowls of chips. Fine dining indeed.
We had begun the party decorating cupcakes, and finished it with younger daughter blowing out curlicue candles on the backs of ice cream rats with licorice tails and jelly ears. Then she sat down and opened way too many presents. For some reason, the tradition in this neighbourhood is to give three to five presents in one gift-bag, which I suppose is really looking a gift horse in the mouth, but this meant younger daughter received about thirty gifts. She was getting rather overwhelmed by this point, but held it together admirably, although I had to ramp up the prompting toward the end.

Each girl then politely approached me for her goodie bag, thanked me for inviting her, and departed with the appropriate parent. It's a very courteous neighbourhood (except the drivers). I sat down at the computer and waited for the earliest illegal showing of the latest Doctor Who.

I've been planning theme parties for my girls for the past dozen years. For four or five of those years, the girls overlapped and I had to plan two parties within the space of one month. I sincerely hope next year is the last. I mean, each one is a real learning experience, but it's time for the tee-shirt, doncha think?

Afterthought: Re-reading this, I really come across as an ungracious hostess. The girls were pleasant and cooperative, and the usual little guardian angels took turns guiding younger daughter over the social hurdles. I also forgot to mention that the Resident Fan Boy and elder daughter availed themselves and filled in so many gaps, so I could supervise and take pictures. Do I sound a little less peevish now?

Inadequate, but good

I've never been much of a Star Trek fan. I liked the funny episodes like "The Trouble with Tribbles" and "I, Mudd", but for the most part I was forced to watch it, mainly because my sister (a Leo) insisted on it, along with Gilligan's Island and a host of drek. When William Shatner moved on to other stuff, like TJ Hooker, I did not follow. The new Star Trek movies? No thanks, with the exception of The Voyage Home (another funny one). Shatner moved into his self-deprecating era, and onto Boston Legal. Ho-hum. Nothing against the guy, just not a particular fan. (And this has nothing to do with his gradually looking more like the Grinch.): However, I was rifling through the more recent magazines at the speech therapist's office (instead of writing letters, or responding to reports, as I should have been doing), and came across a recent interview he did with Maclean's (that's a Canadian news magazine, for you non-Canucks). Full of that self-deprecation with a hint of the ego for which he is also famous, there were a lot of witty remarks and brief mentions of his personal tragedies, but his answer about being a parent stayed with me. I'll italicize it, but I am paraphrasing, because I don't have the article in front of me:

I've been an inadequate father, but a good one. The two go hand in hand.

Okay, buddy, I wasn't a fan before, but I am now. You've walked the walk, haven't you?