Babies

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Weigh-In Wednesday: Waving at Babies

My husband and daughter are absolutely mortified by my habit of interacting with babies and small children in public.

My position: Reacting enthusiastically to our youngest members of society is a key part of the social contract.

Their position: It’s weird and creepy.

To be very, extremely, crystal clear: I’m not approaching strange children. I’m talking about being in the cereal aisle at the grocery store, and a baby in the shopping cart a few yards away waves or babbles at me. Or standing in line at the bank or the airport, and a toddler makes eye contact and smiles.

I will 100% always smile or wave back.

On occasion, I have been known to talk to a baby. Like, if they proffer a toy they are holding, I might say, “Oh, that’s a beautiful duck.” Or if they say, “Hi!” or “Bye!” I will respond in kind. I stop short of asking children their names.

I do respect distance; I’m not getting up in a stranger’s personal space, no matter how small that person is. I’m not going to tickle a bare foot or pat a child on the head. That is a bridge too far. But waving and smiling and even playing peek-a-boo all seem reasonable to me.

Trying to think back to when Carla was small, I think it would have hurt my feelings if she tried to participate in social behavior with a stranger and they ignored her. I thought she was darling, and I was proud that she felt confident enough to interact with other humans, and I would have loved it if adults had responded to her bids for engagement. I did not (and do not) love it when strangers ask Carla her name, or where she lives or goes to school, although these are good opportunities for us to discuss what kind of information is okay to share with strangers and how to respond politely and truthfully without giving away too many personal details. (Also, most of the time, these questions seem very innocent and friendly, with no ill intent from the asker.)

I do understand that the calculus of what’s appropriate or not might be different for men than it is for middle-aged women. Although I still think, like, making silly faces at a baby over the back of an airplane seat is a totally acceptable way to interact with a young human.

However, I am willing to acknowledge that I may have wildly misunderstood the assignment. So I would like to know what you think.

image from Canva
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What to Get for a Fifth Baby

It seems like so many people around me are having babies lately! My husband’s assistant! My daughter’s former teacher! And another former teacher! Babies everywhere! It’s very exciting – there are few things more delightful than a hotly anticipated baby. 

Recently, the mom of one of Carla’s classmates had a new baby. This was the fifth baby in that family. Since Carla is classmates with one of the other children, we have known the family for several years now. It’s a lovely family – all the children are charming, well-behaved, and polite, everyone is always dressed and groomed beautifully. I always give a little wistful sigh when I see the mom – who is both physically beautiful and a truly kind, generous person – and her little row of gorgeous kids, because she has a parenting gift that I do not share. Well. Perhaps that is why I have the one child and she has five. 

Some of the other moms from Carla’s school got together to do a meal train for this family when the new baby arrived. I love a meal train. Food is one of my love languages, for one thing. Plus, I love it when a family gives you a lot of very specific details about how best to nourish them. Plus plus, I kind of love the challenge of making a meal that I have never made/would never make for my family. It’s kind of like trying on someone else’s life for a minute.

(Me being me, of course, meal trains are also opportunities for a lot of stress. Since I don’t normally make this kind of meal, how do I know if it’s GOOD? What if they have a very specific idea of what Good X is supposed to be like, and I do it wrong? Am I making enough food? Have I included enough options for people who don’t like the main course? Etc. etc.) 

When there is a new baby, I always want to give a gift. And I had the same urge for this new baby. I ended up not getting the baby a gift, but that really happened as a result of a bunch of tangled thinking and then running out of time, not out of lack of desire. And so I really want to know what you would get for a fifth baby (or a third baby, or an eighth, or whatever baby is being added to a family of More Than Two).

Here are my thought tangles:

  1. This family probably already has EVERYTHING they need. This is Baby 5, and Baby 4 is still pretty much a baby. What gift could I give them that they don’t already have?
  2. But this is a New! Baby! It’s always nice to have something special and specific for a particular kiddo.
  3. Usually when I give New Baby gifts, I like to give a present to the older sibling; they understand gifts while the New Baby doesn’t, plus, it helps them feel included in the celebrating. But when there are four other children in the family already… well, that starts exceeding my gift budget. Not to mention exceeding my knowledge of what to buy for kids of varying ages. 
  4. And what would I GIVE? I know that gift options and gift budgets vary widely for a lot of reasons, but it seems to me that the moms of Carla’s classmates lean toward the high-end/expensive end of the spectrum. Like… fancy children’s boutique stuff. And I feel super uncomfortable with that kind of thing because how do I know if a wooden rainbow in muted shades of grey would be a welcome gift or in any way worth $28? That kind of thing makes my generous impulse shrivel up and hide. I am much more a Cute Onesie I Spotted at Target kind of a girl, you know? And maybe that would feel… cheap to the mother? Like a last-minute “whoops I need a gift” gift rather than something I agonized over? I don’t know. 

So! That’s why I ended up making a meal and not giving a gift. I am sure – SURE – that whatever I chose would have been met with sincere gratitude and effusive thanks, because that’s what this family is like. But I opted out anyway.

I’m still wondering, though, what YOU would get for a fifth baby.

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Phases

Posting has become harder for me lately. The kinds of things I want to talk about in this space – cooking for my family, planning for the holidays, complaining about ridiculous things – seem so glib and frivolous what with the state of the world. I don’t want to ignore the grief and fear and outrage so many people are feeling so acutely these days. But nor do I want to post about those things; I am fully aware that my existential dread is not worth discussing in depth, and I don’t feel like I have anything substantial to contribute to the existing conversations around All Of This.

When I seek out content online, it is typically to distract me from what’s going on in the world. Yes, I try to stay informed, but I can’t linger too much or I want to crawl into bed and sob forever. Instead, I want to spend my free time reading blog posts about baby names and holiday gift suggestions and how people spend their day and what people are doing with the veggies from their latest CSA and what it’s like to send a child to college. Things that are fun and, sure, sometimes, important, but maybe not important important, you know? (Are you blogging these days? Leave me a link. I want to read your posts.)

So today I am trying to push through the resistance that comes from not wanting to be too cheerful in the face of (another) tragedy and talk about something frivolous and unimportant.

I want to talk about phases.

Carla is at the intersection of several, shall we say, “challenging” phases. The phase where she is four, so she obviously knows MUCH better than me what she should be doing at any given moment which results in me asking her to put on her shoes fifty times and then just putting them on myself because we are already 14 minutes late for school. The phase where she screams when she (perceives she) is Deeply Wronged. (She has NEVER been a tantrum thrower, so this is startling and I am Not A Fan.) The phase where she eats nothing (we have been here before, at least). Mornings are especially fun around my house, is what you should take from all this.

It is so very difficult, when you are in the midst of a phase, to see it as A Phase rather than The Way Things Shall Be Until The Bitter End. I am only looking at these as phases because I was complaining to my friend the other day and she very calmly said, “Gosh, phases always last about two weeks longer than you think they should.” And all of a sudden, I realized that yes! These were phases! They will not last forever! (Also: Two weeks? Hahahahaha, friend.)

Sure, I want to “enjoy every minute” and I certainly am not trying to wish time away. It goes by fast enough. But also sometimes being a parent SUCKS and I wish these phases would end more quickly.

Of course, the trade off is that one phase ends only to usher in a new, perhaps equally challenging phase.

BUT there is a bright side. An annoying bright side, for those of us who are Not At This Particular Stage Yet. But a bright side nonetheless and I am grasping at anything to keep me upright here people. The bright side is that once this phase passes, it will (probably) cease to seem that bad.

This must be biological, right? The way I sometimes think fondly of pregnancy and daydream about being pregnant again. When pregnancy – for me – was not just smiling strangers and baby hiccups and cute maternity clothes. Oh no. It was twenty-five weeks of all-day-every-day morning sickness. And sudden onset crying. And it lasted for FORTY-TWO WEEKS. It was NOT GREAT. Stop rose-coloring those pregnancy glasses, me.

But the same goes for challenging childhood phases! And I know it’s not just me. My mother and mother-in-law have this rosy vision of their own children and how perfect they were. It’s kind of dispiriting – almost insulting – in a way, to have your parent look at your child, shaking her head in utter disbelief, saying, “Boy, I never went through this with my kids! They were perfect!”

Okay, okay. I am exaggerating for effect. When they talk about how perfect their kids were (and you realize “their kids” are me and my husband, right? so perhaps there is a little creative license based on audience going on here), they are not doing it in comparison to how un-perfect Carla is. (Obviously, she IS perfect.) They are not jerks. And my mom even has a story about how she once took me to the doctor and asked him what was wrong with me, because I was driving her so absolutely crazy. But it doesn’t seem like she remembers the specifics of that particular challenging phase, just that it happened.

(And, to be fair, I haven’t yet asked her about the Challenging Teen Years. I am still too close to them to hear her discuss them without dismay and chagrin. So there could be some doozies awaiting me. Let’s get through the early childhood years first, shall we?)

What I’m saying is, it’s one thing to be smack in the middle of a challenging phase and another thing entirely to be looking back at it through the gauzy mist of the past. Perhaps it would be therapeutic to take a good hard look backward at some phases and remember them as they were, rather than as the dewy memories of an idyllic babyhood they have somehow become. And then remind ourselves that those phases ENDED and today’s phases will too.

— The Pumping Phase. Worst. Ever. I produced a lot of extra milk, and the only way to not choke my baby was to pump before feeding her. And then, because she got enough nourishment from just one side, to pump the other side, again, afterward. I spent what felt like most of the day attached either to my child or to that horrific breast pump. It was a Very Challenging Phase but it ended.

— The Spitting Up After Every Meal Phase. Oh. My. Goodness. That was so frustrating. And wet. I’m sure it had to do with all the extra milk. But I still had to feed the child, you know? And she spat up every single time. We got some of those cloth diaper inserts to use as burp rags, and then got a huge pile more, because we went through ten or more a day. And we had to buy huge stacks of pajamas because I’d have to change Carla after every feeding. (Which, if you recall, was every two hours at some point. EGADS.) I lived in tank tops and nursing bras because I could rotate them out every time the spit up landed on me. That phase sucked. But we eventually got through it.

— The Refusal to Sleep on Her Own Phase. Oh, Carla. Until she was… two? Older? (See, how quickly I have forgotten?), Carla would not fall asleep unless my husband or I was holding her or at the very least in the room with her. My husband spent portions of many nights asleep on the floor in front of her crib. Because I could not fall asleep on the floor, I remember singing her endless verses of lullabies and then trying to back very slowly out of the room without her noticing. Very rarely successfully. UGH. That was rough. But it’s over now!

— The Reckless Disregard for Personal Safety Phase. There was a time when Carla had the speed of a cheetah and the caution of those wild squirrels that leap out in front of your car as you drive through your neighborhood. There was one incident where she dashed into a PARKING LOT and I almost died right there, so certain was I that she would be crushed by a car. She used to run pell-mell down the halls of her school, completely oblivious to things like commands and other people and immovable obstacles. There was a memorable heart-stopping few moments at Target when she took off down an aisle and out of my sight. Now, at least, she has some sense that streets and parking lots are dangerous and that she needs to keep me in sight at all times. The phase ended, and I no longer have to carry her everywhere for fear that she will escape and fling herself off a cliff.

— The Putting Everything in Her Mouth Phase. Yuck. I was not a fan. My floors were much cleaner, but still. I am glad this one’s in the rear view.

— The Potty Training Phase. This one is partially my fault, because I got it into my head that she should potty train at age two even though I don’t think she was quite ready. And then it’s partially her daycare’s fault, because the classroom teacher decided she was going to potty train the entire class at the same time (why? WHY????), and then a few weeks later she quit. In any event, I am SO GLAD THIS ONE IS OVER.

— The Postpartum Phase. This really has nothing to do with Carla, but when I look back on it, I wonder if I had some form of PPD or post-partum anxiety. I was so afraid to leave the house. There’s a picture of me and my husband and Carla together in a park when she was twelve days old. It’s super cute, and one of the first of the three of us together. But I don’t really like it because it carries with it all these bad feelings. I remember so clearly how awful that trip was, how afraid I was that something would happen to her, how hyper-aware I was of how soon we’d need to head home so I could pump and feed her, how upset I got when Carla started to cry. It seems as though she and I stayed in the house pretty much the entire time I was on maternity leave, even though she was a summer baby and the weather was (presumably? I don’t remember.) great. I was so fixated on all these potential horrors, constantly worrying that she was sick or there was something wrong with her, so afraid to put her in the car, afraid even to let her spend time alone with my husband or my mom, just in case something happened to me or her at that very moment. I needed to be there. I couldn’t miss out. Add that to the endless pumping/breastfeeding cycle and it wasn’t the happiest time. So very glad that ended.

Of course, there are other phases that I truly miss. Like when Carla was learning to talk, and every day meant a few new words to practice and delight over. Like when she was a snuggly, happy six-month-old who stayed in one spot. Like when she called me Mama.

And there are other phases she’s in the midst of now that I never want to end: The Wakes Up Singing Phase. Or the Phase Where She and Her Friends All Compare Outfits and Jewelry the Second They See Each Other at School (it is ridiculous and adorable). Or the Phase Where She Wants to Help Me in the Kitchen. Or the Voice-Texting Daddy Super Sweet Things Phase. Or the Just Learning How to Read Phase. Or the “I Love You So Much I Never Want to Live Anywhere Without You” Phase.

She is a joy and a delight and I am glad to hold on to the good phases and let the bad ones fade into the detritus of memory.

What are the childhood phases you really miss? The ones that couldn’t have ended soon enough? And the ones you are not looking forward to? (Me, I’m just trying to focus on getting through TODAY. I am not even thinking about the Door Slamming Phase or the Boy-Crazy Phase or the Upsetting Report Card Phase.)