Pregnancy: a subsidiary of Kraft Foods

Jet-puffed body, brain by Velveeta.

Your humble blogress, 22 weeks gestation

Hey, this is hard!

Having one baby, or a baby and a toddler, or a baby and a toddler and a preschooler, is not a sufficient gauge* of whether one "can do this." Those years are wretched. They are not representative of the familial experience. I remember reading once in some Dobson book on parenting that the hypothetical mother whose personal well-being worried him most was the one home with two or three kids below preschool age. Quitting at that point is like calling your mom to pick you up from boot camp or giving up on getting in shape because your first time out you get a stitch in your side. You've just got to get past it, when there's the most work to do and no one to help.

*in most cases, in most cases, in most cases.

Hard to believe: more complaining at CSPP

Whenever you read one of those inspirational bio-shorts about some wonderful woman of yore who had fourteen children and kept a well-ordered house and was her husband's dearest treasure, they all end roughly the same way: she never complained, but labored tirelessly at her work as ordained and blessed by God.

Really? She never complained? Ever? To whom did she never complain? To a person who, 200 years later, pieced together the sketchiest of 70 word biographical sketches from a book about the subject's famous husband?

There are also the sainted mothers in living memory who never complained. If I may say so, this is a rather silly assessment for a child to make. The main people in front of whom I strive not to complain are--can you guess? My dear children. Come to think of it, I can't remember my mother ever complaining. I can remember a few impressive outbursts at extremely trying familial moments over the course of my childhood, but I would not classify them as complaining. More like us rotten kids hearing what we deserved to hear for once (and that was my perspective then).

I marvel that I remember so few of these explosions, considering the amount of time she spent taking care of my three closely spaced siblings and me. But now that I'm an adult, she's been more forthcoming with her feelings on child care, and I don't feel quite so alone. :D I still consider her one of the least grousy people I know. (In case anyone is wondering, the persons to whom a mother is likely to complain are her sisters and friends who are also mothers, her own mother, and her husband. And, obviously, her blog.)

And what's complaining anyway? Is it complaining if a third spectacular excretory event in a day makes a mom want to cry, and the kids can tell? Is it complaining if it becomes observable that a 10th week of nausea is starting to get a pregnant lady down? Is it complaining to say that childbirth really, really hurts? Are the facts of a mother's life complaints in themselves, such that they should never be stated?

I'm a complainer, there's no doubt about that. But I don't think that if a pregnant mother or a mother of young children or a mother with little household help answers honestly when someone asks how how she's doing she should be painted as a bitter, closet feminist complainer. If you ask me what I did today, the facts are that I got hugs and kisses and sang songs, but also that my hands got really, disgustingly dirty and more than a few times I was discomfited by the thought that I've got an unpleasant day coming up a few months from now. It's just true. A mother's whole life is true, not just the romantic parts.

A brief reading for your day

I'm a sucker for anyone who quotes Lewis' trilogy. This brief piece is worth the couple minutes it'll take you to read it. Teaser:

Our work is undergirded by a builder whose plans we don't yet see. Nonetheless, we are called to build carefully and to labor well, not always knowing how God will use the work. It is reminiscent of the line in C.S. Lewis's Perelandra: "One never can see, or not till long afterwards, why any one was selected for any job. And when one does, it is usually some reason that leaves no room for vanity. Certainly, it is never for what the man himself would have regarded as his chief qualifications."(1)

HT: My own mother, who is doubtless still waiting to see how on earth her labors in raising me will turn out :P

Boy, do I know the feeling

Maintaining a properly eschatological perspective is crucial for surviving in the CSPP trenches. When I’m too nearsighted to lift my eyes beyond the childbearing years, I can really empathize with the girl in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”:

She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

Yes, I do sometimes feel a bit outnumbered, thank you for asking

(If you’re too sophisticated for bathroom humor, don’t bother reading on)

I don’t have to get out the CSPP trading cards to know that a 4-to-1 boy/girl ratio (counting Dad and me) is not even close to the big time in boy numbers (think Preus…). But I’m here, and so are they, and—some days, it just seems like there are so many of them.

Scene: Nature’s call interrupts a family walk around the periphery of the local golf course. Dad directs the boy to the most appropriate venue, given the available options.

Boy, returning to path: Why are there so many bathrooms on the golf course?

Mom, muttering darkly: Some people call them trees.

Dad, gleefully: My son, you’re catching on: the world is our bathroom!*

Boy, musing contentedly as he gets back on his bike: I’ve never peed on the golf course before.

This episode occurred shortly after a family vacation during which the three-year-old, to amuse himself along the drive, composed a song. It was a real epic, celebrating the struggles and triumphs of the trip. The refrain: “And I peeeeeeeed on the plaaaaaants in the woooooods.”

Sorry. I just had to share. It's been like that lately.

*I should perhaps note that Dad is normally what I would consider to be a fairly civilized specimen of the male of the species (or should I say, the male species).

Barefoot and pregnant: be careful

I knew this would happen.

I do a lot of canning. I don't know if it saves any money when you factor in the peripheral expenses (jars, lids, garden costs, and ingredients I have to purchase), but it makes me feel like I'm helping.

Canning is hot work and all husbands like a barefoot wife in the kitchen, so I've been going about it for three summers without benefit of shoes. And it wasn't even the canning that got me in the end, but it could just as easily have been.

On the day in question I received one (1) phone call. I answered the phone and the person on the other end said, "Peanut butter rolls." Then he hung up. This was the only adult to whom I spoke that day.

Now, some people might find this insulting. Especially pregnant people who had spent the morning loading the dehydrator with a million bananas acquired free the day before and the afternoon canning jelly in a very zone 6 kitchen in August while still looking forward to making the buns for supper. But the caller had the callee's own gluttony going for him. So she counted not the heat and the fatigue and the completely unseasonable and arguably terse request, finished her jelly, and moved on to the unscheduled rolls. She even altered her course mid-prep when the Dad/Baby Caucus decided they'd rather have caramel than peanut butter.

Everything was going fine until it was time to turn the rolls out onto the plate. Then the uncoordinated barefoot pregnant lady in the kitchen spilled boiling caramel on her foot. Her bare foot.

It was sad.

What's a girl to do? Cooking barefoot just isn't safe, especially when the project involves lots of hot liquid transfers. But being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen is a confessional statement not to be cast off in the face of mere personal injury. Fear of blistered feet didn't get anyone onto the sanctoral calendar.

Then I remembered another project I'm supposed to have in the works: Dad's boot scent pads. He told me it would be cheaper for me to make them but I see now that they are quite inexpensive, and considering how much it's going to cost to get my sewing machine fixed so I can do this project (elastic, you know), maybe we'll have another talk about it.

Anyway, it seems to me that these scent pads could easily be adapted to ensure both foot safety and essential barefootism in the kitchen. Simply slide a protective layer under the pad, adjust to a comfortable tension, and the top of your foot will be covered while the bottom remains bare as Bilbo's (and probably as crusty after a few years). Obviously asbestos is the ideal option (that's why they call it asBESTos), but with all these dang hippies taking over the government and outlawing my favorite deadly household products that actually WORK, we'll just have to improvise with what we can find around the house. Probably a disposable diaper full of cutaneously toxic chemicals would do pretty well. Sizes NB-2 should cover most sizes of feminine feet.

Mockup with immediately available materials: conventional rubber band and size 4 cutaneously toxic disposable diaper. The rubber band is too loose and the diaper is too big. Even the cat disrespects it. Please follow above directions for a more reliable model.

Girls, you know we want you barefoot, pregnant, and sweating to death in the kitchen. But please, be careful.

Toilet training

her wry face blooms red
lo! roots! Dark and thick--
the corner; forbidden soil.

The show must go on

Twas a great day on Planet Homeschool. We spent much of the morning as world-class cricketologists: We read about crickets. We caught crickets. We made an ecosystem for our crickets. After lunch, we pulled off an astonishingly quiet Quiet Time. But all through the day, even as we marched down the markerboard with minimal meltdowns, I had a nagging feeling that I was forgetting something. . . something important.

I shook off that feeling as best I could, reminding myself to focus on what we were doing rather than on what we weren’t. And I thought: Hey, I can do this. Hey, I’m doing this! The afternoon drew to a close in triumph* with the reading of the last Sidewalk Sentence, and we began eagerly to anticipate Dad’s appearance. Suddenly, the nebulous forgetfulness that had been bothering me all day came sharply into focus in a single, urgent word: Supper!

Right. I’m supposed to feed them all, too. Every day. Several times, every day. Sigh.

Everyone got fed, and everyone was happy, especially when I pulled out the leftover cookies for dessert. But I’m at least one ball short of an amateur juggling act, ya know? :P

I know I'm not supposed to try this at home,
but where the heck else am I supposed to try it?

*Lest you be conjuring up some ridiculously idealistic picture of our day in your head, let it be known that “triumph” can be defined as follows: BoyOne hopping back and forth over his Sidewalk Sentences, insisting that he can read them just fine upside down (he can); BoyTwo dancing about in rage because BoyThree interfered with his dirt pile; BoyThree, moving on with complete unconcern for the maelstrom in his wake, dumping an entire bucket of water onto himself; the dog all the while trying really hard to get someone to throw her ball.

Sociopaths

I'm always mad at the kids for failing to care that they've done something really rotten and generated all kinds of unnecessary work and/or sadness. I tell them why whatever they did was rotten, I tell them how unhappy it made the victim, I administer their punishment, they cry and then ask what's for supper and does Dad get to stay home tonight and how do I like this picture? They're sociopaths. I want to shake them and do it all over again until they seem appropriately penitent.

But if they felt as remorseful as I think they should feel over all the crimes they commit in a day, they'd be depressed all the time. Perhaps this is some kind of built-in coping mechanism so that humans can remember their childhoods fondly. And really, it isn't just a feature of childhood. Although we occasionally feel genuine sorrow over pain we've caused, it's pretty common for our primary cause for remorse to be getting caught or having lowered others' opinion of us, no matter how old we are.