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  • Ok but ALSO:
  • Midlife POV
  • Influence and Dooce
  • Horse therapy
  • You can’t go home again
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  • Before and after
  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

May 18, 2006

I read Dooce’s recent entry with great interest, because the subject of when or if to have a second child is something that rattles around in my brain from time to time.

That’s actually just how I envision the topic, as a rattling collection of open questions that gets mentally flung around like a pinball, ricocheting among the mess of emotional response and worry and what-ifs. Every time JB and I talk about it, we end up sort of trailing off, each lost in our own thoughts on the matter.

I don’t feel any particular pressure to make a decision very soon, but I do think about it. Do I want another baby? Can I handle another child? (Note that my ability to imagine a larger family stops abruptly at two (2) kids and can progress no further without my brain literally ejecting from my skull.)

As usual, Heather has a slew of thoughtful comments and few unbelievable zingers. God will decide when it’s time for you to expand your family, wrote one person.

Gosh. Well, God also gave me the ability to roll my eyes so hard at that particular nugget of wisdom that they briefly stuck in the back of my eyesockets, making a little poit! sound when they finally disengaged. And so that is my official response to the notion that Jesus is gonna take the wheel for me on this one: poit!

Poit! Say it with me! Poit!

There is more than one do it for Leta comment, too, because god (poit!) forbid you raise an only child, friendless and alone and with no shoulder to cry on when you, the mother, keel over dead. Also, hey, is the unbelievable guilt-weight of parenthood not enough? Because here’s just a little bit more. Enjoy!

I read all the comments on this post of Julie’s, too; there are some amazing stories in there. It’s good for me to know I’m not the only one to have a hard time with this decision. I think more people stress about this than the hairball of Whether to Have Children In the First Place; at least when I was struggling with that issue I felt kind of alone in my confusion and hesitation, most people seemed to just know one way or the other rather than engaging in the fence-straddling I did.

And look at you now, so happy with Riley! – you might be thinking, and you’d be right, I don’t have a single solitary regret about having Riley, in fact I wish I could fly back through time and tell myself how great everything was going to be. But I can’t, that was the process I had to go through at the time, and although I might have guessed that the decision regarding a second child (or the timing thereof) might be an easier one, it’s just as confusing and difficult.

I have the same concerns I think a lot of people do. I worry about money – specifically, how we could swing daycare for two children. Daycare for Riley costs X, and my job pays more than X, but two payments of X and pretty soon I’m only working to cover daycare. So daycare would be out, but I don’t think I want to stay home full time and even if I did, we still have other things like savings and our mortgage and bills and so on, and as things are today, I can’t afford to stay home (yes, even if I stopped paying for cable). I worry about our stability and happiness, the fact that Riley takes up so much time and energy as is, how can we manage two? I worry about dying in some horrible accident and now JB has to care for two kids by himself (until he remarries some hottie with a 27-inch waist who doesn’t write snarky things about him in a blog).

I’ll tell you something, though. A coworker of mine brought his brand-new baby into work a while ago, and I looked at his (the baby’s) tiny red face and helpless newborn flailings and thought, hmmmm. No thank you. But I saw this same baby again recently, and he had pudged up and was in the goggling-around-comically stage, and I thought: yes. Oh, yes please.

Did you ever see the incredibly retarded Starsky and Hutch movie with Ben Stiller? Okay, it’s awful, and I’m not recommending it, but there is one really funny scene where Will Ferrell, as a guy with a dragon fetish, says “Alright guys, I’m not gonna lie to you. This is gonna get kinda weird. ….Two dragons.”

Uh, it’s a little hard to describe.

Anyway, I (dorkily) quote that sometimes when I look at Riley, “…Two suctopuses.” Two of them! My god. Things would definitely get weird. It would be like diving down the rabbit-hole headfirst and never seeing the light of day again, wouldn’t it?

And I think what an amazing amount of joy and love, what depth and color he has brought to our lives. How I have learned that I have so much to give, how proud I have become of what I can do, how I believe in myself now more than I ever have. How for all the pain-in-the-assedness of this baby wrangling business, there is real no-shit magic in it, exquisite moments I want to experience again someday.

(Sorry! Am cheesy! Poit!)

Here, then, is my mantra for now: Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Yes? Maybe.

Not today, though. Dude. I just got out all my size 10s again.

May 16, 2006

Do you think it’s weird if you’re in the middle of watching The Office finale and one of the characters says something momentous to another character and just for a minute you forget altogether that they are actors on a hilarious show and you practically burst into tears right there on the couch because right now you believe in love, yes, you believe in a love that spans the ages and you believe in Jim and you believe in Pam and my god, my god, hope is a thing with feathers, Jim and Pam, and never stops at all, and –

Uh, it’s possible I’m watching a little too much television lately. (But wow!) It’s probably a good thing that every show I’ve been addicted to is coming to an end so I can free up the mountainous acreage in my brain currently devoted to fuming bitterly over the loss of American Idol’s Chris Daughtry, or endlessly worrying about who’s up next on the Sopranos death-o-meter.

The weather has turned magically delicious so it’s time to turn off the TV anyway, and spend these evenings in the backyard. Maybe do some gardening, pick up a few heaps of dogshit, keep an eye out for Giant House Spiders moseying in the open screen door. We sat out there last night until it was too dark to read, and it was wonderful – I think those are my favorite moments from summer, just relaxing on our own patio, flipping through magazines and drinking tall sweating glasses of lemonade.

I took these photos after watering the plants yesterday:

Also, here is a picture of Dog mid-yawn:

And some recent photos of the boy:

Now let’s go all MULTIMEDIA and shit since it’s been a while since I’ve bored the pants off you with some videos. Ready? Okay!

1) It’s Dog! Throwing her kong around to get the biscuits out. Oh Dog, you are too cool.

2) It’s the boy! When he first learned how to bounce in his bounceamajig!

3) It’s JB! Who is going to kill me for posting this very awesome candid video of him performing for Riley, who is nearing his bedtime and fading fast, but still greatly entertained – as I promise you will be upon viewing this.

:::

Lastly, I decided to update my sidebar whenever I made a new post on Purple Is a Fruit. I’m not sure how interested you are in reading that blog, but I will be updating practically every damn day, so…I hope you visit me there. Leave a comment if you have a minute, I sort feel like I’m shouting into a void right now and it’s making me self conscious and WAHHHHH, etc.

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