Christmas Eve Brunch

On our road trip to Sun Valley on Christmas Eve, we stopped at AJ's restaurant in Mountain Home, just across from the truck stop, for brunch with Clara and Louis' Great-Gramma Nina, Gramma Diana, and Great-Aunt Lainer (whose real name is Elaine). Also Grandpa Dale.

Right when we stepped through the entrance, we saw them in the restaurant's back room, where the Rotary Club usually meets. The hostess had put them at a long table. Aunt Lainer, grinning maniacally, waggled her hand at us. Gramma Diana hunched her shoulders forward and pursed her lips with delight. Great-Gramma Nina went the other direction, leaning back, smiling widely and pushing her palms against her thighs.

Grandpa Dale, sipping a bloody Mary, was more reserved, though no less excited to see us.

Gramma Diana got Louis right away. He had just awoken from a nap in the car and was feeling pretty good. He was excited about all the kisses, the smell of Gramma Diana's perfume, and the sounds of the women's voices. Also the way the light reflected off Aunt Lainer's gold-rimmed glasses.

Clara grinned sheepishly as the women cooed and kissed Louis. It was silly the way they were hee-hawing over him and nibbling his cheeks, but it unexpectedly made her feel good, too. She climbed onto a chair next to Simon and sat back on her new pink cowboy boots with the star cut-outs, graciously accepting the giant styrofoam cup of hot cocoa with whipped cream the waitress handed her.

Aunt Lainer, who had flown in from Washington for Christmas, couldn't get over Louis' sheep-skinned-lined hat with ear flaps. Lainer, who is a supervisor in a factory that makes utilitarian office furniture, claimed to have one just like it. Louis gave Lainer some drool-filled smiles and stuffed a fist into his mouth. She had a giant crimp in her gray-blond hair from a ponytail she'd recently worn. She screeched with laughter at something Gramma Diana said and Louis started to cry, his lips quivering as though his feelings had been hurt. I reassured Lainer that he was getting teeth and this was probably what upset him, but she said her gravelly smoker's laugh often makes babies cry.

The food came, piles of starch and protein that were all the same color, but all delicious.

Clara wanted my attention, but I was chit-chatting with Gramma Diana. She climbed up onto my lap, and positioned herself so she was facing me, and cradled my face with her hands. She made my face stay directly in front of hers, and whenever I started to speak to Gramma Diana, she kissed me on the lips with a hashbrown-greasy mouth.

It was lonely at her end of the table. Grandpa Dale was cradling Louis and taking him on a walk around the room while he drowsed and sucked on his binkie. She had finished the plate I made her by splitting my own in half and arranging the scrambled eggs and cut-up sausage on a little side plate the waitress had given me. The talking women formed a warm nexus, and there was joy there.

After a minute she slid to the ground and started fingering Great-Gramma Nina's maroon cardigan. The cardigan had leaves embroidered all over it, and Great-Gramma named them for Clara: beech, oak, maple. Great-Gramma Nina grew up in a hollow in West Virginia called "Butt Holler." I am not kidding. It was named for a family whose last name was "Butt." Great-Gramma says growing up there no one ever thought twice about the name.

I mentioned to Great-Gramma how nice I thought she looked. She is on Weight Watchers, and, being an extremely disciplined and focused person, is only about fifteen pounds from her goal weight. She is also only nine stamps short of earning the last Rachel Ray dish in the Albertson's Grocery Store Rachel Ray promotion.

At that point, Aunt Lainer leaned over to Gramma Diana and bestowed upon her the highest compliment paid by women to each other in our family: "You look like you've lost weight."

"Oh, Lainer, you old sweet thing," Gramma Diana said, giving her a side-hug.

Aunt Lainer told how, the night before, she and the other two women had stood at the piano and sang Christmas carols in three-part harmony ("People kind of dispersed at that point," Lainer would later admit). Egged on by me, she and Gramma Diana and Great-Gramma Nina started to hum and would have broken into "Silent Night" right there in AJ's but for a rare feeling of constraint, possibly brought on by the presence other diners.

Grandpa Dale guffawed at the women's singing and, pretending to motion to the waitress, said, "We better get another round of Bloody Mary's."

After a minute, Clara started dancing for Gramma Diana. Clara sometimes wanders our house singing "Johanna" from Sweeney Todd, but replacing the name "Johanna" with "Diana." Gramma Diana likes ketchup on her hashbrowns, too, and there's a cat named Felix that lives at her house in Boise. (Although the last time we saw Felix he was part bald from a nasty case of ring-worm and so couldn't be petted or even touched)

Grandpa Dale sat back down with Louis, who was now wide awake. He walked his long, brown, callused farmer's fingers up Louis' legs and tummy until Louis chortled with glee. Then he gave him back to Lainer, and Louis was content to lie in her arms, comfortable and warm and fascinated by her glasses. Lainer looked content, too, the way some women do when holding babies, as though they're remembering babies from long ago, or maybe just reveling in the warm, soft baby heft, because they don't, very often, get to hold one anymore.

An Underwhelming Santa

Thursday was Santa day at Clara's daycare, and I found myself vying with Santa Claus himself for a parking space. He and I passed each other two or three times as we criss-crossed the streets near the daycare. He was in-costume, and his enormous, curling beard rested on the steering wheel of his Chevy Cavalier (one of the daycare administrators later expressed relief over his new set of wheels. Apparently he used to drive an orange Nova).

I grimaced as I finally succumbed to the "bad" parking space, an ambiguously available nearby curb that seemed to invite fender-benders. Parents streamed down the sidewalk. A mom in black, knee-high stiletto boots and a coat that belted at the waist led a little girl dressed to the nines in red and green. A dad carried a tiny baby wearing polished black loafers. I'd totally forgotten about Santa's visit, but it probably wouldn't have mattered anyway. We'd already told Clara that Santa was made-up.

Still, she sensed the excitement as we got out of the car. She was, unfortunately, dressed entirely in pink. As for me, I'd simply hopped into the car in a trusty pair of black sweats and an oversized T-shirt that read, "I lost my shirt at Simon's bar mitzvah so I had to wear this one home" (yes, I own a T-shirt from my husband's 1994, Las Vegas-themed bar mitzvah). My hair, a newly minted boxed shade of "ancient sunrise," stuck up all over the place. I thought, when I cut it short, that it would be easier to style, little knowing that "styling" would require sticking my head under the faucet every damn morning. I took a deep breath and hoped Santa wouldn't judge.

The daycare center director, who is nearly six feet tall, met us at the door dressed as an elf with a sleigh bell at the end of her pointy hat.
"I think I passed Santa looking for a space," I told her.
"Oh dear, is he having trouble parking his sleigh?" she said.

The main room inside was packed with daycare workers, parents, and kids. Clara wended her way through the legs to sit near her class. Everyone was singing "Jingle Bells," and "Feliz Navidad" in anticipation of Santa's entrance. Clara doesn't know these songs, but she gamely lip-synced along (though what she might have been lip-syncing is anyone's guess). The kids were excited but the grown-ups were really excited, and I could tell Clara found this confusing. A few of the grown-ups seemed almost a little feverish, as if they were about to be raptured. People clapped and hooted as Santa entered, and Clara nodded, grinned, and whacked together her stuffed dog Floppy and her princess-themed sippy cup.

"Ho-ho-ho!" Santa shouted, and then he hacked and hawked into his hand. "A little too much fuzz from the beard," he said. Santa and cats: they both hawk up fur balls now and again.

The director and teachers decided that the babies should be the first to sit on Santa's lap. Santa settled himself into the red-colored throne the preschool teacher had fixed up for him, and a set of parents handed him their baby boy.

The baby looked to be about ten months old, and the parents had carefully parted his hair on the side and swept it over like John F Kennedy's. As soon as the kid's little diapered-bottom hit Santa's lap, he stuck out his arms and gasped as though he'd just come over the top of a Six Flags roller coaster. Then he held his breath for a minute, and his cheeks popped out and his face turned bright red. Then he screamed. The parents all giggled diabolically. The daycare administrator twittered as she passed around her iPhone with a photo of the kid's beet-red, tear-streaked face.

I had to leave before it was Clara's turn to sit on Santa's lap, but when I picked her up later that afternoon, I asked her what she'd asked him for.

Her eyes widened, and she whispered, "A candycane!"

"You did?" I replied, surprised. My kid really, really does not know what Santa is all about.

"Yes, and then he gave me one," she said, shaking her head in astonishment.

"Is that all you asked him for?" I said.

"N-o-o-o-o. I also asked him to sing me a song. And... he... did!!"

"Wow," I said, trying to imagine what Santa might have thought of her. He probably thought she came from an extremely disadvantaged home, little knowing that Hanukkah Harry has been sending us packages since the day after Thanksgiving.

The next day Clara was talking about Santa, and Simon asked Clara where she thought Santa lived.

"In an old person's home," she replied.

Clara and Louis

On Monday, during rest time, Clara kept getting up to use the potty. It was all a ruse, I knew. She was tired of "reading" books to her babies in her bedroom; tired of lolling about on the floor and singing; tired of banging her feet against her bedroom door. She hasn't actually napped during rest time for about eight months. Nonetheless I need time for myself (or time for myself and Louis), so I still make her go to her room for a few hours after lunch each day.

I saw her tiptoeing across the upstairs landing to go to the potty for the third or fourth time, wearing a t-shirt and nothing else. There's only so much a person can pee and poop, I thought. After a moment, I heaved myself out of the chair where I was breastfeeding Louis. Holding him in the crook of my arm, I went upstairs to the bathroom. She was standing in front of her potty, peering down into it dubiously.

"Mom, my poop has a whisk," she said, pointing.

"A whisk?"

"Yep, a whisk, like a cat has."

"A whisker?"

"Yep. My poop has a whisker."

I trust I don't need to go into detail here. I explained to Clara that our bodies can sometimes excrete something that resembles a long, straight fiber, and no, I don't know why that is. Then I disposed of her poop and cleaned her potty. I helped her wash her hands and sent her back to her room.

Twenty minutes later, she was back in the bathroom.

When I went up to see what she was up to, again with Louis in the crook of my arm, a long sheaf of toilet paper rolled out the bathroom door to greet me like a carpet for tiny visiting dignitaries. Clara had the sink water running, and was standing on her little stool to reach the faucet. She had filled up a plastic sandwich container we got for our wedding ages ago--she uses it as a bath toy now--with water and was dipping fistfuls of toilet paper into it and using the sodden paper to "wash" the counter. She had stuffed a bunch of toilet paper down the unstoppered drain so the water would accumulate in the basin. The soap dish was sunk to the bottom of the basin, and the soap had disintegrated into fragrant, white slime.

"Okay," I said. "That's enough." I grabbed a hand towel with my free hand and started mopping.

"Nooo!" she squealed. "Mom! I'm-I'm-I'm washing! And you can't take that!" She frantically grabbed at the sandwich container as I dumped the water out of it. Louis watched her, smiling faintly and sighing. Here was a person, only a little less tiny than he, that could walk and talk and command the attention of an entire room with the flip of her hair (whereas he can only command the attention of a room with the ferocity of his baby gas). At two and a half months, Louis can't always focus his eyes on Clara when she's, for example, streaking past him wearing a pink tutu and long, hot pink evening gloves, or twirling on the couch for "couch ballet." When she's right next to him,though,putting stacks of beaded bracelets on his chubby arms and legs or adorning his head with flowery hairpieces, he gives her the choicest of smiles. He does occasionally get irritated with her but, interestingly, not when she's calling him "Doodles" or "Dee-dee" at close range in a high-pitched voice, or forcing a binkie into his mouth. And not, either, when she pushes his cheeks together with her hands and says, "Say 'chubby cheeks,' Louis." No, the only time he gets irritated with her is when he wants his milk. And then it's not just her, but the entire universe, that's wrong.

"Back to your room," I ordered Clara. "Go!"

But five minutes later, just when I had settled back into my chair, my arm sporting a red mark where Louis had fervently sucked while I mopped up water, I heard the toilet seat slam.

I found Clara standing on it, fishing for her toothbrush on the shelf above. She got it just as I grabbed her with my free arm. In her other fist she clutched her Thomas Train training toothpaste. She wriggled free from me and thundered down the hall to her room.

"What are you doing?" I shouted, striding after her.

"I have to brush my teeth!" she shouted back, trying to shut her door on me. A stuffed dog and a purple sea turtle prevented her door from slamming it. I had to wade through the ball of blankets and the sea of books on her bedroom floor to get to her. I wrested the toothbrush and toothpaste from her as Louis watched, vaguely interested, from my arm, his head gently waggling back and forth as Clara and I grappled.

"Noooooo!" Clara screamed. "I need that! I need that! I-I have bad breath!"

The Birth of Louis Oliver

DISCLAIMER: This blog post is about a baby being born, and so it necessarily contains some information about childbirth. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not gory or anything, but if you are at all squeamish or sort of freaked out by childbirth, you probably shouldn’t read it. As my husband says, reading it is, in some ways, “kind of like revisiting eight-grade biology class.”




When you read about birth, or watch movies about birth, it seems like labor always begins when the mom’s water breaks. When you actually have a kid, you discover this only happens about 20 percent of the time. When Clara was born, for example, the nurse delivering her had to break my water.

When Louis Oliver was born, on August 26, my water did break first, and it happened pretty much like the movies. I was sleeping, then I was suddenly standing in the bathroom, half-awake, soaking the rug in front of the bathtub.

I got Simon up, and we both lamented the fact that it was 2 am, a scant few hours after we’d gone to bed. I called the on-call doctor, who said, “Come in when it starts to hurt.” Then I ran a hot bath and had some chocolate. Simon stood in the bathroom doorway for a moment, his eyes bleary. Then he suddenly switched into high gear and went frantically about the house making sure we had everything in our hospital bag.

I hoped labor wouldn’t start for several hours, but my lower abdomen felt heavy and restless. I wasn’t surprised when the discomfort started to coalesce into contractions about ten minutes after I got into the bath.

Simon got Clara up, wrapped her in her favorite blanket and held her against his shoulder. Any wishes we might have had about her staying asleep during the transfer to the neighbors’ house were instantly dashed. Clara is not a sleeper under the best of circumstances. She was delighted to be awake at such a grown-up hour, and launched into her favorite game—“pretend mewling cat that licks its paws”—before her eyes were even properly open. While Simon carried her across the lawn to the neighbors’, she chattered about the night and the “rain” (the sprinkler system was running).

I had to go through the emergency room at the hospital because the main entrance was closed. The emergency-room technicians made me ride in a wheelchair to Triage while Simon parked the car. The nurse who pushed the chair told me this was owing to the fact that someone in labor could just squirt out a kid in one of the long passageways between Emergency and Triage and then the hospital would be in a real pickle.

Sitting in the wheelchair was faintly unpleasant. I could feel Louis’ head somewhere down in my nether regions, hanging like a ripe cantaloupe.

In Triage, they strapped me to the abdominal monitor so they could measure my contractions. For the first ten minutes, everything was fine. Then I felt a surge from the top of my stomach. I stared hard at the ceiling. It was one of those institutional false ceilings, ubiquitous across corporate and medical America. It looked like it was made of cork, with tiny ventilation holes punched through it. I focused intently on one of the pinholes. It suddenly seemed like a lemony-yellow watercolor stain bled slowly out of it. Little black stars sparkled around the periphery of my sight. Then, as I inhaled sharply, the lemony-yellow color got sucked back into the pinhole’s darkness.

“Wow! That was a huge contraction!” Simon said, looking at the contraction monitor.

“I think I’m gonna barf,” I said. We called the nurse, who detached me from the monitoring system so I could shuffle across the hall to the bathroom and empty my guts.

When I got back, the nurse checked my cervix, pronounced me ready for Labor and Delivery, and asked if I wanted an epidural. Friends, there was only one answer to that question: YES.

In a moment, the nurse came to my bedside in Triage with another wheelchair. This time I couldn’t really sit in it. Instead, I used my triceps to carry my weight, hovering just above the seat and puffing through the contractions like a freight train. In my memory, I see the nurse frantically running with me to Labor and Delivery, pushing the chair so hard that we take the corners on two wheels.

In reality, I’m sure her pace was much more sedate.

When we got to Labor and Delivery, we learned the person delivering and administering the epidural would not arrive for several more minutes.

As Simon and the nurse helped me into a bed, I tried to steel myself for each contraction. You might ask, “Didn’t you do this before?” Yes, as my rancher-father would say, I am a “two-calf heifer.” On top of which I didn’t have any pain medication when I gave birth to Clara. This time around I felt peculiarly unprepared to give birth, worn out from chasing a toddler in an extremely-swollen state, psychically exhausted, and disenchanted with the whole idea of a “medication-free” birth.

Waiting for the nurse-anesthetist, I tried to “surf” the waves of pain. But that only made me think of that Hawaiian surfer who got her arm bitten off by a shark in the early 2000’s. How painful must that have been? Then I tried to imagine my cervix opening, while thinking “Open, open, open.” This was something my mother did when she gave birth to me and my siblings. But the exercise only reminded me of a story from my childhood, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. A greedy man in the story can’t remember the pass phrase to open a special cave full of treasure. The pass phrase is “Open sesame,” but the man, who must remember the phrase to leave the cave before murderous robbers find him there, keeps shouting things like, “Open wheat!” and “Open barley!” and “Open rye!” (At this point in the story my siblings and I used to frantically shout, "It's 'Open sesame!! Open sesame!!'" ) Alas, the robbers catch the greedy man in the cave and whack him into four pieces. Gruesome, very gruesome. Not something to think about while laboring.

At last, the nurse-anesthetist arrived to administer the epidural. She was a dour-looking woman who recited the long epidural disclaimer in a fatalistic tone. With her stocky body and matter-of-fact way of speaking, she reminded me of a long-haul trucker. Stuck on a freeway outside Fargo during a freak blizzard in July. With no friends, food or radio contact.

Finally she was done giving the spinal block and left.

Quickly the labor pain abated and my outlook improved considerably. I could even doze a little between contractions.

My OB came in around seven, fresh off a vacation to Red Fish Lake up North (My OB almost never takes vacations, delivers over 98 percent of his own patients.) He and a nurse put my legs into these weird…well, leg-holders, for want of a better word. They didn’t look like stirrups to me, but that’s what they kept calling them. I could feel my legs a bit—a tingling sensation—but I couldn’t move them at all.

“Okay, when I say, I want you to pick up her leg and push her knee to her chest,” the nurse told Simon. “I’ll get the other one. When we’re done with the contraction, put the leg back into the stirrup. If you drop it, it’ll hit the doctor or go off the side of the bed and take your wife with it.”

She glanced up at Simon as she spoke. She must have noticed the look on his face, because she added, “I’ve never actually seen it done, but it could happen, which is why I have to warn you.”

The nurse acted like she’d delivered babies for about a million years. Her hands did things automatically—positioned monitors, pressed buttons on the side of my bed, hung an IV bag—while she chatted amicably with the OB and other nurses.

“How are you?” my OB asked me.

“This epidural is great. I feel like I’m in the Caribbean,” I replied, hearing the slur in my speech.

“Mmmmm….I’ve never heard it described that way.”

My OB has a giant head with thick, dark hair that stands on end sometimes. His head is so big in proportion to his body that I sometimes think of him as mostly head, with a slender, effete body hurrying along behind.

He settled himself on a stool between my knees to catch the baby. I dozed off and on between pushing. It must have been an interesting-looking tableau: Me with my legs up in the birthing position, but drowsing a little as though I were on a beach somewhere with a Mai Tai in my hand. Simon and I asking the OB questions about his vacation when I wasn’t napping, the conversation peppered with kiddie-themed jokes (the OB has three young kids) and observations about the air, which was smoky from wildfires.

At times throughout my pushing phase, the OB stared off dreamily over my knees and I knew he was probably reminiscing about his vacation. That he was able to do this while seated directly in front of the gore of childbirth is a testament to his professionalism and experience. He’s probably caught thousands and thousands of babies in his career.

After awhile I started throwing up again and the nurse brought over some little throw-up bags. I filled one and casually handed it to Simon.

“Don’t worry. She’ll be handing you something far better in a couple minutes,” the OB told him. Simon gave the bag to a nurse to dispose of. The vomiting seemed to help push the baby down further, and it took only three more pushes for him to emerge.

The doctor didn’t have any trouble getting the baby’s head out, but he had to wrangle his little shoulders a bit. “Linebacker shoulders,” was what he called them.

The first thing I saw was a little head covered in black hair, then an impressively pink little body and chubby little arms. I found Simon’s eyes through the glare on his glasses and grinned.

Louis was confused and upset, and his forlorn cry nearly broke my heart. I wanted to hold him immediately, but the nurse wanted to towel him off a bit. Finally she gave him to me and I cuddled his slippery body close, trying to find in his features resemblance to me or Simon. But unlike Clara, who at first definitely looked like Simon’s side of the family, Louis looked like himself right from the get-go. He had lots of dark hair and a pretty little mouth. I remember thinking he was beautiful, and I must have said it out loud, too, because Simon said, “You can call him beautiful, even if he is a boy.”

I looked up and it seemed strange the doctor was still there, and the nurses. It seemed like it was just me and Louis in the whole universe. He had soft blond down on his arms and a patch of darker down on his upper back.

After awhile everyone left and it was just the three of us: Simon, me and Louis. At some point, Simon realized he was still holding my leg up--clutching it, really. He carefully put it back in the stirrup and took Louis for a bit, talked to him and kissed him. I thought how I couldn’t wait for Clara to come meet Louis, and the things she might say when she saw him for the first time.

Other brothers, swing-set speculation and scary books

I.

A few days ago, I decided to take Clara on a dry run of the baby's birth. I hoped it might help her conceptualize what was happening to my body and what was going to happen in our family in about three weeks. We went to the Treasure Valley Midwives Center first, because they have a big poster on the wall that shows a life-size, full-term baby en utero. Also, I was hoping someone would be in labor so we could hear some yelling and grunting, and I could explain to Clara the process of childbirth. Alas, no one was in the two birthing rooms.

Next we went to St. Luke's hospital, where I plan to deliver. In the car, I told Clara that Baby Brother would soon come out of my stomach, and she said, "Oh! Then I will get into your stomach."

"Please, no," I replied. "That would be really uncomfortable for both of us."

We took the elevator to the eighth floor, where the newborn nursery and labor recovery rooms are located. Clara is not a fan of elevators, but I wasn't about to walk up eight floors. To keep her mind off her fear, I held her in the elevator and encouraged her to count the floors. A woman asked her, "Are you having a brother or a sister?"

"It's a girl," Clara said matter-of-factly.

"It's a boy," I clarified.

There were only two newborns in the nursery: a sleepy little girl and a little boy who was not amused. I held Clara up to the window while she pressed her nose to the glass and talked baby talk to them: "Deedle, deedle, dee. Leetle, leetle, leetle babies."

After a moment or two, a dad showed up with his little girl and they stood in front of the nursery windows. A woman came into the nursery through a side entrance, accompanied by two nurses. They stood over the disgruntled baby boy and talked.

"Do you have a baby brother or sister in the nursery?" I asked the little girl. She pulled herself up on tiptoes to see through the glass.

"That's my baby brother," she said, pointing to the baby boy.

"Oh, Clara! It's another little girl with a baby brother!" I exclaimed.

"Put me down," Clara instructed, and I let her slide off my hip. She and the little girl, who said she was four, crouched by the wall and compared their shoes. Clara was wearing her dark blue Mary Jane Crocs with a big, rubber pink and white flower on each toe. The inside of each flower was a hard red plastic heart, cut to look like a jewel. The little girl, who was dressed to the nines in a glitter-embellished, hot pink, spaghetti-strapped tank top and white eyelet-trimmed skirt with some sort of petticoat underneath, pink-and-white bracelets and a touch of pink lipgloss, nevertheless wore simple pink flip-flops. Smart, very smart. I always say, never let your choice of shoe interfere with an already-busy outfit.

"I like mine better because they come on and off more easily," said the little girl, demonstrating with one flip-flop.

"I have some of those too," said Clara. "I have a baby brother in my mom's belly. I, I will take him out for you." Her eyes grew wide, and she made a scoop out of her hands and pretended to scoop baby brother out of my stomach to show the little girl.

"When was the baby born?" I asked her dad.

"Earlier this morning," he replied.

"And that's mom?" I asked, pointing to the woman standing with the nurses over the baby's bassinet.

"Yes."

The woman, like her daughter, had long blond hair. She was tall and slim, wearing an ankle-length turquoise jersey dress that cinched in at the waist, perfect make-up and lots of gold jewelry.

"Wow, she looks amazing for having just given birth!" I breathed. She looked amazing in general. I did not look like that after giving birth.

"I did not look like that after giving birth," I said to the dad. He roared with laughter.

"It was a different sort of scenario," he explained.

"Oh," I said. Feeling it was impolite to press further, I thought: Adoption? Surrogacy? Ne'er-do-well relative who accidentally got knocked up and can't be bothered to raise a kid right now? I burned with curiosity, but there are some things you just don't ask.

The woman and nurses were wheeling the baby in his bassinet out the door of the nursery, and the dad beckoned to the little girl. The little girl turned to go, tripped on her flip-flop, and fell to the floor. She hastily incorporated the fall into some sort of jungle dance move, springing to her hands and knees and pretending to be a tiger. Then she stood, dusted herself off and ran toward her dad. But before she got to him, she changed her mind and came running back to us.

"I have to tell you one more thing," she whispered to Clara. Clara's eyes widened again and sparkled, and a funny little smile played around the corners of her mouth. Clearly it was delicious to have someone who was both older and had fabulous blond hair come running to you to whisper a secret.

"He's my baby," the little girl whispered, without even a trace of bitchiness. It was simply a statement of clarification. The baby brother belonged to her and Clara shouldn't be confused about this. Clara nodded sagely and we walked back to the elevators.

II.


A few days later, Clara and I were playing on the playset out back, and she generously offered to take Baby Brother out of my belly. She had been running around without clothes in the backyard, in a state my girlfriends and I call, "naked and feral." She made the usual scoop with her small hands and pretended to shovel Baby Brother out of me and place him on the swing.

Then she wanted to swing next to him.

"What do you think Baby Brother will look like?" I asked her as I pushed her in the swing.

"He will look like a princess," she replied.

"Oh? And what does a princess look like?"

"He will have a long, pink skirt and a long, pink dress."

"And what else?"

"He will look like the Good Witch of the North."

"Like in The Wizard of Oz?"

"Yes."

"And what sorts of things do you think he'll like to do?" I asked.

"Ummmm...Play baseball."

"Won't that be sort of hard in his dress?"

"Yes," she sighed impatiently.

"Why will that be so hard?" I asked.

"Because his dress is so nice. And he will get it dirty."

III.

When she was much younger, like eighteen months or so, there wasn't much Clara was afraid of. Alone, she repeatedly went down the slide at the kiddie pool, the one that's shaped like a dragon with water squirting from his nose. One time she accidentally flipped around halfway down and came into the water backwards. She insisted on sleeping with her door closed and, when we'd inadvertently leave it open, she'd shout, "Hey! Shut the door!" She liked to shut herself in my closet with the lights off and pretend to be a cat.

Then, a few months ago, we started daycare part-time. Immediately her play was enriched. At home, I noticed her doing things we never did together. She pretended to be different farm animals, invented elaborate games involving couch cushion "mountains" and her collection of plastic knight figurines, engaged in deeply-felt pretend dialogue with her stuffed dog, Floppy.

At the same time, she started talking about monsters.

The first of her books to be relegated to the "objects of fear" pile was one called Goodnight Goon. It's a funny parody of Goodnight Moon that involves vampires, werewolves and all sorts of slimy creatures. The monsters, from my perspective at least, are not drawn to look scary. The book is supposed to be funny.

One night when her grandparents were visiting, Clara told them, "I scary of this book." So they brought it downstairs. In the context of the living room couches and throw pillows, wooden hutches full of china and knick-knacks and framed family photos--in other words, Grown-up Land-- the book seemed less offensive to her.

But the day her grandparents left, Clara told me the book needed to go.

"What do you mean?" I asked. "Do you mean we should throw it away?"

"Yes," she said firmly. Soon after, she was distracted by a puzzle she liked, and seemed to completely forget about the book. I casually placed it on a shelf. The shelf was just tall enough that she couldn't see the book (although it was still within her reach).

Awhile later I was doing some crafts at the kitchen table when I heard her muttering about, "This scary book" and rustling around in the cupboards. I didn't give it much thought until I went to empty the trash, and this is what I found:

I put the book away in a safe spot.

The next day, I was upstairs folding laundry when I heard Clara chatting with Floppy about, "this bad, scary John Pig." Sure enough, when Simon later went to throw something away, he found, John Pig's Halloween in the trash. The book is about a piglet named John who's too frightened to go trick-or-treating with his friends. He stays home, and a kitten witch crashes into the jack O' lanterns on his front porch, comes inside and teaches him how to make all sorts of scrumptious Halloween treats, like persimmon-plum pie and pumpkin mousse. Then the kitten witch invites a bunch of her friends over--all lovable monsters with gross-looking spiders hanging off them--for a Halloween party. John Pig and everyone else end up having a blast.

Clara used to love the book.

The Wicked Witch of the West from Clara's Emerald City play set has since joined the offending books, and I have an inkling that a set of Groucho Marx glasses with wiggling eyebrows and a set of wind-up, chomping teeth from last Halloween will soon be added to the "scary" pile.

Vignettes

I.

Tonight after dinner, Clara made Simon and I a picnic in her play kitchen with her plastic food. It was a very carb-heavy picnic. We had donuts, cookies and several slices of plastic bread. Then she requested we sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," two or three times in a row. The upper octaves of that song are nearly always out of reach for me.

Eventually, Clara said, "Ok, just Daddy sing it."

"I want to sing something else," Simon said.

"Don't you want me to sing 'Bobby Magee'?" I asked Clara. It's a rare day when she says 'yes' to Bobby Magee. Usually when I wallow into it, she starts to cry in distress. My voice tends to strain a bit, and I do have a tendency to sing through my nose on the high notes. The effect can be startlingly submarine, like the sounds a pod of whales conversing in the depths of the ocean might make. But I do so love to sing that song, and it's the only one I know that remains within my approximately five-note range.

"No!" Clara said, looking at me with alarm.

"Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waitin' for a train, and I was feelin' oh as faded as my jeans," I began, hoping she was bluffing. Or hoping maybe she would suddenly perceive the true, colorful, shall we say "distinctive" quality of my voice and, entranced, let me finish the dang song.

"No! No! Not this! Mickey Mouse!" she said. Anything, anything to shut me up.

"If you're going to sing 'Bobby Magee,' I may as well sing 'Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay,'" Simon said. But he finally ended up singing, "Home on the Range" for her. I was politely asked not to join in.

I pulled up my maternity shirt partway to feel the air on my skin, and the baby started kicking around. Clara put her little hands on my belly and felt him move a few times. Then she started playing with a musical card my mom got me for Mother's Day, one that she'd immediately claimed for her own and dragged to the basement playroom. The card urges moms everywhere to take a break from housewifery and put their feet up. When you open the card, there's a picture of a lady relaxing on her bed while Etta James belts out, "At Last."

Clara sang along softly with the card, but instead of singing, "At Laaaaaaaaaast," she sang, "A Laaaaaammmmmb."

Then she put the card close to my belly so the baby could hear it. She pretended to read the card, saying, "Baby brother will be born in the sand in the river. And there will be crocs."

"There will be crocodiles?" Simon clarified.

"There will be crocodiles and they will bite him."

"Oh, no!" we protested. "Although," I reconsidered. "He would be quite the tender morsel."

"The crocodile will open his mouth and baby brother will crawl inside! And he will eat him! Haha!" Clara said, and she flashed her pearly white baby teeth.

II.


Yesterday Clara and I went grocery shopping. She had three sample bites of watermelon. Then, while I was inspecting the bananas, she attempted to deconstruct the toothpick dispenser near the sample tray. It was a minor faux pas compared to our past experiences with the sample counter. I have seen her reach into the plastic dome covering the cheese samples and grab a whole handful of cheese cubes and stuff them in her mouth before I can say a peep. "Sample" is apparently not yet in her lexicon.

She's just tall enough to reach the bottom of the fruit displays, and yesterday I caught her gratuitously kissing a plum. It occurred to me that she often sees me holding fruit close to my lips at the store. Really I'm sniffing it to check for ripeness, but I could see how, from her perspective, it might look as though I were kissing it. Of course, yesterday I felt obliged to buy the plum she'd mauled, which was fine, because she gobbled it up as soon as I had paid for it.

At the end of our shopping, we used the restroom. As we were leaving, a whole bevy of women came in, and Clara asked, "Are these ladies going to go pee?"

"Probably," I answered. "Everyone pees."

As if to clarify that this was indeed true, Clara squatted and ducked her head under the nearest stall, which was, unfortunately, occupied. The lady in there didn't say anything, so I hope she didn't notice the little girl with blue eyes and braids staring up at her while she indulged in a nice, relaxing bathroom break.

III.

Lately I've been having a lot of shortness of breath. No doubt it's because the baby is growing and pushing up against my windpipe. Usually the shortness of breath occurs when I'm excited. Like, if there's a big plate of delicious food in front of me, I'll start panting and wheezing and Simon has to talk me down, remind me to breathe, the food's not going anywhere, I can take breaks, etc.

A few weeks ago the shortness of breath happened while we were getting ready to rent a paddleboat to float out on one of Boise's ponds. I have always, ALWAYS wanted to go on a paddleboat, but never had the chance. While we were getting out of our car in the parking lot, I saw a large family also getting out of their car and heading towards the paddleboat rental office. It suddenly seemed like I had to get there first because, what if they took all the paddleboats?

"There are probably thirty paddleboats here, each one of which seats three people, and we are the only two groups of people going to rent paddleboats," Simon pointed out as I hurriedly waddled, red-faced, down the sidewalk with Clara on my hip.

I beat the other family to the rental office, but realized just as I got there I had to pee something fierce. The nearest bathroom was across the park. I broke out in a sweat. As I huffed and gasped towards the distant cinderblock bathroom, dragging Clara by the hand through flocks of lounging geese and ducks, Simon tried to keep apace and murmured soothing things like, "There are enough paddleboats for everybody. We will all get a chance to ride the paddleboat."

Last night I had a very different kind of shortness of breath. It started when I was lying in bed, thinking of Clara sitting across from me at lunch yesterday, with her long, curly hair tucked behind her ears. She'd dexterously wielded her fork through mounds of gourmet macaroni and cheese and broccoli. We'd been at a restaurant, and a little boy at a nearby table had stood up on his chair and pretended to shoot her with his index finger. She'd smiled at him cheekily, and would have shot him back, except just then his mother said, "Lincoln, sit down on your bottom. Little girls do not like to be shot at."

As I lay in bed thinking about all this last night, my chest got really tight. It was because of something indefinable in the way she had looked, the way she ate. She was ravenous for the food, ravenous to look at the people around us, interested in what they were eating and what they were doing, what they were talking about, excited to be drinking water from a glass instead of a sippy cup.

A lot of the time, from day to day, she'll ask me endless streams of questions about how things work and why people do what they do. Sometimes I feel like it'll drive me crazy. At lunch yesterday, though, she hadn't said anything, just drank up everything with her eyes and started to confidently grasp at her own conclusions. I felt sad because I knew she would need me less and less as time went on. Her curiosity would eventually lead her to places I couldn't go.

Thinking about this in my bed last night, I started to lose my breath again, and had to call Simon upstairs.

Unable to articulate what I really felt just then, I said, "She likes you better than me! She doesn't like me anymore! I can't keep up and do fun things anymore because I'm so big and pregnant! And soon I'll have a new baby and things will change forever!"

"She doesn't like me better," Simon said. "Whenever you're at work or gone shopping, she talks about you constantly."

"I feel like I'm losing her. I'm losing my baby!"

"She's two-and-a-half. She's not a baby anymore," Simon said.

"She can't even sit on my lap anymore," I said. "It's like, when you have a kid, your heart is outside you, running around, playing in the sandbox, on the swings. And now, we're going to have ANOTHER kid?!? So now, what, I'll have TWO hearts running around outside me??!! How am I going to do it? I feel like I'm going to split in half!!"

"I don't know how it all works, but I think we'll figure it out. It's going to be fine," Simon said.

After Simon left, I comforted myself with the thought that other people do it--other people have two kids, and it works out alright.

Floppy the stuffed dog: mascot of revolt

When I picked Clara up from daycare today, there were small hints of an impending storm. Throwing aside a tiny play aluminum pot, she came at me like a hurricane of lime-striped leggings and pigtails tied with sparkling pink jelly-bands. Her eyes, I noticed as I picked her up for a hug and a kiss, matched her Crocs: they were bright pink with exhaustion. She moaned as she buried her face in my neck. She shuddered wordlessly--a kind of tearless, inner weeping she employs when she wants to portray to me how rotten and unjust the world is even though I just saw her having a blast with the other kids in the play kitchenette and I know she got to do all sorts of fun things today at school.

"Do you want to climb into the car seat yourself, or would you like me to put you in?" I asked her as we left the building.

"Me do it!" she yelled, then instantly became absorbed in balancing on the concrete border of some raised flowerbeds along the sidewalk. She shot me a few coquettish looks; she was toying with my patience and she knew it. Finally, after giving her a few chances to get into the car on her own, I grabbed her and deposited her in her seat. "Me do it!" she howled. "Mommy, I want to do this!"

"Nope, you had your chance. We gotta go," I said. She wept the bitter tears of those who look back on their lives and see only regret and missed opportunities. However, her mood brightened considerably when we turned onto a main thoroughfare and passed a construction site with a bright orange porta-potty. Maybe there were new avenues of joy to be found in this lifetime.

"Mommy, I want to go potty in this potty," she said, pointing to the porta-potty.

"Sorry, no can do. But you can go potty when we get to the store," I replied.

"I want to go potty in this," she groused. I tried to think of an interesting way to explain why she couldn't, something that would sate her. Unfortunately, my lane was also merging and a white Volvo was lolly-gagging in my blind spot. Alas, my pregnancy brain cannot multitask. Clara started making a weird, high-pitched fake-crying sound. Startled, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw she was baring her teeth at her reflection in the window.

I made the turn and said, "We can't go potty in the orange potty because it's out in the sun all day, so the inside's really, really hot. And it's very stinky."

"Oh, needs a shower," Clara muttered. Then she erupted into a series of sharp, high-pitched meows. Her impression of an indignant cat.

We pulled into the store. Clara had been cuddling her stuffed dog, Floppy, in the crook of her arm since leaving daycare, so I asked if she wanted to bring him in. She didn't, but she did want to snap him into her car seat and bundle him in a blanket and fiddle interminably with his ears.

"He's the best baby I ever seen and he gettin' bigger," she said, smoothing his ears back.

I asked her again as we finally left the car if she was sure she didn't want to bring Floppy into the store. She said no.

Just inside the sliding doors, all hell broke loose. Because guess what? Clara really had wanted to bring Floppy into the store.

While we were dithering about Floppy, a little boy took the last grocery cart with a red car attached to the front. We waited a moment for another, which unfortunately also gave Clara time to arpeggio up to the highest, loudest shriek of her sobs. I was determined to ignore her crying, get in the store, get the few items we needed, and get out.

"Honey, I gave you a choice about bringing Floppy into the store while we were at the car, remember? And you said, 'No,'" I said.

"Let's go get Floppy!" she vibratto-ed.

"No, Honey. We parked way, way out in the parking lot. Mommy is tired and I don't want to go back for Floppy. We're only going to be in here for a minute. Hey, look, there's a red car cart! Here, let me put you in."

Sobbing, inconsolable sobbing. My experience thus far with Clara crying in a store is that she soon stops after we get going down an aisle, both because she is emotionally labile and also interested in what's going on around her. But today her cries only intensified. As we rounded the deli counter, an elderly lady said, "Oh, Sweetie, what's the matter? Why you cryin' poor Baby Girl?"

"I want my Floppy!" Clara sobbed from where I'd strapped her inside the red plastic car.

"Oh, is Floppy a stuffed animal?" the elderly lady asked me.

"Stuffed dog," I replied. "We had to leave him in the car."

"Oh, poor baby," said the lady. She followed us into produce. I chalked it up to the effect of Clara's pigtails and big, blue, tear-filled eyes, and so didn't get too irritated with the lady.

But then we were bottle-necked next to the bananas by an unusually large, roving herd of after-work shoppers.

Clara was still sobbing. People began to watch.

"She misses her stuffed dog, Floppy," the elderly lady explained to our spectators. "They had to leave him in the car" After a dramatic pause, presumably to let the effect of her words sink in, she continued: "I say go get Floppy!"

There were murmurs of agreement from the other shoppers: "Yeah, go get Floppy!" People nodded and looked at me expectantly.

"If you don't shut up and stop inciting the mob against me, I'm going to punt you over that pyramid of apples," I told the elderly lady. Just kidding. I didn't say anything. I just blushed really hard and swallowed. Then I parked the cart, unstrapped Clara from the plastic car attachment and put her on my hip. I wiped her tears with my fingers and walked away. She had stopped crying by the time we rounded the corner into frozen foods.



It bears mentioning that Floppy has many roles besides that of insurrectionist. He is also a potty tester, bravely sitting on a potty before Clara to make sure there's no tomfoolery (automatic flushers, super-loud suction systems, rotating hygienic plastic wrap). And this morning he briefly served as a pregnancy surrogate. Clara performed a cesarean of sorts, pretending to scoop "baby brudder" from my stomach with cupped hands (small fingernails sporting chipped polish in the hue "Verve.") She gave "baby brudder" several kisses and carefully deposited him into the outstretched, supine body of Floppy.

Oh, Floppy, if only you could carry this baby for me.