Sweet dreams: James, at about 5, before my re-tucking efforts.

I don’t think it’s a huge leap to say that sleep — from your newborn’s earliest days to your teen’s freakish ability to sleep for what seems like days — is a major parenting issue. Can I get an amen on that? Amen. Thanks.

I’ve always been … let’s call it “a stickler” or “tough” or, oh, I don’t know, mean, when it comes to my boys and their sleep. Getting them to settle down and sleep, stop crying and sleep, eat and then sleep: it was my whole world when they were babies, as it is for most parents of infants. It informed everything, not least how I handled feeding. I breastfed, but I quickly figured out that my boys (particularly Daniel, the firstborn) just did better on the sleep thing if they had a nice, full, two-boob meal. No “snacking.” I had a few days early on where I got off track and Daniel got off track with me that led to five-minute nursing sessions followed by catnaps and more crying (from us both). Throw tomatoes at me if you like, but for me –  for us, really — on-demand feeding didn’t make things happier, sweeter or smoother. Quite the opposite. But when Daniel fed for 20 minutes, he emptied me out and filled himself up and then (after much burping and gurgling and some crying), slept, and usually slept well.

That was my first sleep revelation.

The next one came when D was about 12 weeks old and I went back to work. Maggie, our nanny, was whispering on the phone with me one day during her first week (for the record, that first week was the only time I called her randomly to “check in.” After that, it worked best when she had her day with D and I got my day done at the office so I could leave work behind and get home). “Why are you whispering? Is he asleep?” He was, she said — and he was in his crib.

This was huge. By that time, D was pretty much sleeping through the night (11pm to 7am, thank you very much, and within another couple of weeks after I started back to work, he dropped his late feeding and went down at 9, in a series my husband called the Three B’s: bath, boob, bed.). But his naps hadn’t quite gelled yet, and all I’d managed was getting him to sleep in the stroller during our marathon daily walks when I was home on leave.
“How did you get him to sleep in the crib?” I whispered to Maggie, incredulous. Her reply? “He seemed sleepy, so I put him down.”

He seemed sleepy. So she put him down. Wow.

And that was revelation number two.

So. Both boys (and both parents!) have always done best when sleep is regular, adequate, and predictable. As they’ve gotten older, they’ve gotten good at staying up late (I am not, it has to be said quite strongly here, one of those moms who, post-infancy, has to have her children in bed on the dot of a certain time in the fear that all hell will break loose if she does not. I’m mean, but I’m not crazy; that works when they’re babies, not when they’re 6 and 8 and want to stay up later on weekends or vacations, or have the major treat of watching the Times Square ball drop on New Year’s Eve). They’ve even gotten okay-ish at not waking up super-early on days they don’t have to.

But here’s what happened recently, and what’s become revelation number three: I don’t put my kids to bed anymore. What?! How did that happen? I didn’t plan this, I swear to you. It just… happened. Our nighttime routine has evolved to happen mostly downstairs. Ever since summer, they shower rather than bathe (baths are for babies, don’t you know). The shower they can use easily happens to be on in the ground-floor  bathroom. (James still needs help; Daniel is big on being a Man and showering alone, then wrapping a towel around his waist. Like a Man). So they shower and get into PJs downstairs, then run up to brush their teeth and get their books. We all read together on the couch, and then up they go, with a little swat on their pajama’d butts (and sometimes even a kiss, which I get when I ask from Daniel, but only when I steal them from James).

I guess it started precisely because we got less stickler-ish about strict bedtimes. We just make sure they more or less get upstairs, on school nights, at 8pm. They can play for 20 minutes or so, and then we yell up to them to get into their beds (there’s a lot of yelling either up or down the stairs at our house; what would I do if I lived in a ranch-style house? hmmmm….). James is generally asleep within minutes after that, and Daniel has the privilege of staying up, puttering quietly in his room, until closer to 9 (he leaves for school an hour later than his little brother).

But while one of us used to go up and supervise their getting into bed, tucking in and plugging in nightlights and closing curtains, we don’t anymore. No decision was made. We just … stopped. We’re tired. Oh, I still do my tucking and plugging and curtain-drawing (and lavish kissing; bless them, but they do not move an inch when I do, or when I wrestle them out of their twisted blanket cocoons to cover them properly). I just do it later, before I hit the sheets myself. (I also, in Daniel’s room, do a lot of picking up of Highlights magazines strewn on the bed and floor, and wonder why he feels it necessary to empty his change bank and re-sort his collection of who-knows-what in his “stuff” box every night).

I’m still not sure how I feel about this turn of events, even though it didn’t so much turn as sort of gradually evolve. Just this morning, thinking about this, I recalled that I was probably Daniel’s age when my parents sort-of stopped tucking us in (and my mom was a tucker in her day. Literally tucking, like can’t move tucking; like swaddling for schoolage kids tucking). Like my husband and me now? They were tired. I have a picture of them in my head, clear as if it was yesterday, of them in our total-70s den, heads lolling on the back of the couch, trying to fob off the chore on one another, saying, “you go tuck them in.” “I did it last night.”  “Can’t you girls tuck yourselves in?”

But you know? Thinking about it now? That didn’t bother me. I felt like maybe I was on the cusp between wanting my mommy and daddy to do everything for me, and maybe, scarily, realizing I didn’t quite need them to (I was about Daniel’s age, actually, when I started making my own lunches for school).

I happen to believe that my boys like having their time alone upstairs to get up to whatever it is they get up to, then “tucking” themselves in when they get the call-up-the-stairs that it’s time.

But I do have to say, at the peril of my mean mom rep, I miss bath-boob-bed.

So. What’s bedtime like at your house?

Healthy Activity -- or Crazed Competition?

I never have to wait around for very long, or dig very deep, to find something to be either baffled or outraged about when it comes to modern parenting. Yesterday’s crazy-making dose came in the form of a New York Times article about sports for babies.

Yes, I meant to write “babies.”

The article opens with a quote from a woman named Doreen Bolhuis, whose company, Gymtrix, sells DVDs of activity programs for kids as young as 6 months. There’s something about the idea of promoting organized physical activity for babies and toddlers that, to me, straddles the line between “good idea!” and “how crazy, exactly, have we become?” The good idea part is simple: if a parent buys a set of videos and watches them with her 10-month-old baby, and it prompts them to roll around on the floor and play and tumble, but it doesn’t replace other, non-video forms of physical play, isn’t that a good thing? Of course it is. But the “how crazy” part creeps in when parents buy these videos as a super-early start in the world of sports for kids: seeing a straight line connecting baby tumbling videos, pee-wee soccer, competitive lacrosse at age 8, football at 10, high-school glory on one field or court or another, and of course a college scholarship. Here’s a quote from Ms. Bolhuis:

We hear all the time from families that have been with us, ‘Our kids are superstars when they’re in middle school and they get into sports.’

Another company selling baby-centered sports DVDs, also mentioned in the article, is Baby Goes Pro. I watched a bit of promotional video on the website, during which I think I threw up in my mouth a little. This groundbreaking series, the founders enthuse, don’t simply promote physical activity (and provide a break in mom’s day so she can “wash the dishes,” and yes, they say this). They also depict “technically correct” sports skills. It’s all very cool and colorful, lots of rainbow-hued golf balls piling up, say, but then the pint-sized viewers (some of whom can’t stand up yet, presumably) are treated to sights such as a professional golfer demonstrating the proper swing, or a close-up of a baseball batter mid-swing, or a soccer goalie executing the perfect save. All in primary colors, and with musical interludes with a cartoon monkey, M.K. (You have to have a cartoon mascot, after all!)

The founders, two women, chat amiably, as if they’re guests on The View, about how awesome it for parents and kids to have fun with sports and physical activity (with which I wholeheartedly agree) but how, it’s just amazing that watching these videos promotes proper use of sports equipment, and teaches real skills that (it’s not said but it’s strongly implied) will give your child a leg up in competitive sports as he grows. (It is called “Baby Goes Pro,” after all, not “Baby Has Some Fun Goofing Around With a Wiffle Bat and Some Plastic Golf Balls.”)

They actually say — I’m not making this up — that if your kid has watched these videos, and then goes to play golf at age four, he’ll instinctively know how to properly pick up and use the club. Here’s a direct quote:

If you have a three or four year old who’s been watching the video, and he goes to the golf course, he’ll know how to grip a golf club,” says one woman. “And that’s confidence!” enthuses her partner.

Really? That’s confidence? I’m not sure I’d call it that. Delusion is maybe more apt. Or even better: the path to the absolute opposite of what you hope to achieve. Because I’m thinking, the four-year-old who can correctly hold a nine-iron will either be Tiger Woods (and we see how often someone like that comes along), or will be the kid who gives up sports at 13 because he just can’t take the pressure anymore.

What’s sticking in my craw today is how these videos and programs latch on to what is actually a good idea — getting kids and parents enthused about physical activity — and twist it into yet another way for parents to be anxious and competitive, and pass those feelings on to their children.

What do you think?

Happy Halperts. And yes, I realize they're not actually my friends.

OK, so Pam and Jim had their baby on The Office last night. (And if you’ve got it DVR’d and haven’t watched yet, go away now and come back later, because spoilers are ahead).

They had a girl.

I want a girl. I really, really do. And for all the ridiculous reasons — the clothes are cuter, the hair is more fun (if more work); and for all the selfish reasons, or the one major selfish reason. I want a MiniMe. Or a version of me with a big dose of my husband. Here’s an essay I wrote on the subject, for American Baby, published in their January, 2007 issue, but written probably in 2005, when my James was several months old:

Girl of My Dreams

My daughter was going to be named Margot Mary. The first name we loved for being feminine, not girly; familiar, not overused. The middle name was for my grandmother. As my belly grew, so did my desire to have a girl. Still, I had a feeling that my bump was all boy, and sure enough, when the time came, we greeted Daniel and tucked away Margot’s name for later.

The next go around—surprise!—out came James. I fell in love with him quickly, but I also mourned my Margot, the girl I’ll never have.

Okay, go ahead and say it: why not try for the girl I really want? While not technically “too old,” I’ll be past 40 if I wait even a bit after James’s infancy. I love my children, but I also love my body, my sanity, and my relationship with my husband. Mostly, I’m just so stunned and grateful for these robust boys that I don’t want to push my luck.

Besides, my family is lousy with girls. My sister has two daughters (and, okay, a son). One cousin has three little girls. And when James was 3 months old, my younger cousin gave birth to her first child: a girl.

I took James with me to shop for a gift for Isabella, but when I steered the stroller into the section festooned with infant girls’ clothing, I had to steer straight out again. I couldn’t bring myself to fondle the tiny pink bodysuits or to judge the size of the sweet summer dress with its matching poufy pantaloons. I love boys’ clothes for their rugged, little-man look, but let’s face it, baby girls’ clothes are just too darn cute. I had to hightail it out of the store before anyone could see the dopey mom crying into the layette sets.

Lots of women imagine having a daughter. I dreamed up my actual daughter: she would have a riot of auburn curls, like my mother’s, and her dad’s big blue eyes. I would pass on my stubborn streak; my appreciation for the color red (and why it beats pink); my love of Little House on the Prairie; and, eventually, her great-great grandmother’s blue satin and lace garter, which all of us girls wore on our wedding day. Plus, I’d give her the best kind of father a girl could have – the kind of man who should raise daughters, because he’s so even-tempered and uncomplicatedly loving.

I realize that I can give versions of these things to my sons. They may never wish that Laura Ingalls was their best friend, but they can have a red rug in their bedroom. They can hand the family garter to the women they marry. But best of all is what my sons are already giving me, as they help me rewrite my celluloid motherhood fantasy – Woman Wanting Girl – with themselves in the lead roles. Without that old film running in an endless loop, I’m free to have fun with the reality of boys, their hit-and-run hugs, their take-no-prisoners play. In return I hope I can show them, but what kind of woman I strive to be, that they can love strong women and remain strong men. I hope they’re a lot like their father.

I don’t suspect I’ll stop grieving for my Margot very soon, but someday, maybe, two very lucky girls will grow up to meet my sons. And I can always fantasize about granddaughters.

I am revisiting this now not so much because of that new little fictional daughter (but kudos to the producers for, first of all, actually having a real newborn and not a chubby 6 month old in the role of Cecelia Marie Halpert, and second of all, how hilarious was it when Pam accidentally nursed her roommate’s child instead of her own?!), but because it’s been a few years since I wrote that, and my feelings have not changed.

In fact, they’ve intensified. As I’ve written here, we’ve had a baby boom in the family, and it’s not gone unnoticed by my boys. When I had James, Daniel was not quite two; bringing the baby home was barely a blip in his toddler-centric world. And now, for both of them, there is no life without the other, no memory of time alone (for James it’s the truth, for Daniel it’s the perception, but there’s no practical difference).

But now? Now, both of them would be excellent big brothers. And now, argh! They’re asking for a baby.

Yeah, yeah, I know. That’s normal. There are all these babies in the family, they know babies come from mommies, and so they turn to their mommy and say some version of, “hey mom, got a baby in there, by any chance?”

Just makes it more bittersweet that, no, there are no babies in there.

And so — thanks for indulging me here — I’m left saying another fond, sad goodbye to the Margot who never was.

Quick: What does this cry mean?

I have a brand-new nephew, Nicholas (Nico, for short). His parents, my brother and sister-in-law, are mostly going minimal when it comes to baby gear. Part of that is a space issue–their house is  pretty compact. But a bigger part of it is that, from what I can tell, and not including having read probably four million books on pregnancy, birth, and babycare (they approach most things fairly intellectually), they plan to rely largely on instinct. (And by the way, the photo above is not little Nico, but stay tuned to the end of this post for a gratuitous, isn’t-he-the-cutest photo of the latest member of my rapidly expanding family).

As any of us who’ve given birth can attest, babies themselves are born with a host of fascinating and useful instincts. They can grasp a finger, even with their toes (shades of our simian ancestors!). A newborn placed on his mother’s belly will scootch his way up toward her breast–the urge to feed and the intoxicating, familiar scent of the mother is so strong. Even lying in bed beside his lactating mother, a newborn–who otherwise can’t really roll over–can roll himself toward her. They may need some help nursing here and there, but they know how to suck. For seven-or-so-pound, comma-shaped beings, they have pretty amazing abilities to figure out what they need to do, and do it.

So why do their parents, upon having children, seem to lose all instinct?

Oh, I know we don’t forgo all our instincts as adult human beings after we give birth. We know, the vast majority of us, to respond to a baby’s cry with food and/or comfort, for example. But when it comes to ongoing baby- and childcare, too many parents conveniently forget their instincts in favor of relying on experts, or products, to tell them what to do.

It’s not hard to see why. The sheer preponderance of stuff you can use to help you figure out your baby and decide what to do next can make even the smartest (and certainly the most well-meaning) parents feel they need all kinds of help. With all the stuff out there, I’m saying, it’s easy to feel you’re starting from absolute zero when you’re handed your baby for the first time.

Here are just a few examples.

• You can hire people to plan your baby’s arrival, in much the same way you can hire a wedding planner to aid you in hosting your nuptial celebrations. I read an Associated Press article, by Caryn Rousseau, on the phenomenon, and just now went to look for it on Google. The story was picked up by just about every news outlet in the country, so here’s just one example, from the Chicago Tribune.
• You can buy (or register for, so someone else can buy it for you) a baby-monitor-like device that helps you keep track of feeding amounts and times, wet and dirty diapers, and so on. The device is cleverly called the Itzbeen (as it, “it’s been 2 hours since Tyler’s diaper was changed…” because why go by the time-honored butt-sniff?). Buy at your own peril.
• You can download a mobile phone app that aims to decode your baby’s cry for you. I’m trying hard to imagine this one: your infant is wailing, so you ask your phone if it thinks it’s a hungry cry or an I’m tired cry? Seriously?

Back in the old-media days, it was all about the What to Expect When You’re Expecting series of books. I have, or had, more than one of these, and to be honest, there’s some good info in them, but the tone is–at least to my ears–so patronizing, so infantalizing. It’s like you get pregnant and poof, you forget how to use your higher brain. You forget that you have instincts.

I tend to think the pile-on of stuff serves not only to separate parents from their money (not to mention space in their homes), but also to separate them from their inborn common sense.

What’s your opinion? How much stuff did you use to help you navigate babycare?

Oh, and as promised, here’s little Nico, expressing his instinct  with an open-mouthed cry, which I prefer to believe means, “Where’s Aunt Denise?!”):

Five years with my sweet baby James.

Today is my baby James’ fifth birthday. My second son. And even though I’m a second child, and my husband is, too, we still managed to infect our darling baby with Second Child Syndrome.

I’m beginning to believe it’s inevitable. All parents are prone, the second time around, to be less awed (and less cowed) by baby number two; you can’t help it. And we got a double whammy, having a second boy, born just weeks from Boy Number One’s second birthday. So same season, too. I went into it with a naive, blase, “I know what this is all about” attitude.

Bzzzzz! Wrong answer.

James, being his own person (as all children are, of course, but I give my little one extra credit for being even more his own person than most, if that’s possible) muscled his way into our hearts in a different way than Daniel. And still he got infected with the syndrome.

Here are the symptoms:

1. Very few photos. Last year, when James was about to graduate from pre-K, the school asked for a baby photo for a DVD montage. And I had to dig for a really good one. Not only had we taken more baby pics of Daniel by a factor of … well, something quite high, but we also have more photos of Daniel at two, when James was an infant. Or, in every picture of James as an infant, there’s Daniel, too.

This is amazing, because I have spent my whole life grousing (in a nice way) about how there are so few pictures of me as a baby. “They’re all on slides,” my parents used to say. Yeah, right. (They were slightly vindicated a few years ago, when they undertook the huge project of organizing and scanning decades of slides. True enough, all the photos of me as a tot are on slides. But there are still a lot more of my sister, three years older. Like, every step she took.)

2. Hazy memory of firsts. What was James’ first word? Beats me. See, when J was born, Daniel had just started speech therapy, since at age two he had yet to say anything other than “za-dah” (not including having said “star” at 16 months, after which he shut up almost entirely). I was a little preoccupied all through James’ infancy, as Daniel went from twice-weekly to thrice-weekly sessions, and then, at 3, to a special-ed preschool. Now nearly 7, Daniel’s an absolute chatterbox, with a quite sophisticated vocabulary and a sometimes jarringly adult manner of speaking. But the upshot is I just don’t remember what word first came out of Jamie’s mouth. Car? Baby? Dada? All I know is the sweet, sweet relief I felt when he started babbling happily in the right way at the right time.

It’s not just milestones, either. It’s the everyday stuff. I had just started freelancing when James was born. He spent a lot of time in a swing in my office. I nursed him not in the just-him-and-me way that I enjoyed with Daniel, but at my computer, in the kitchen while observing Daniel’s speech therapy, in the pediatrician’s office, everywhere.

But that’s the thing with Second Child Syndrome, right? They go along, because what choice do they have?

3. No parties of his own. Very few non-hand-me-down clothes. Very few just-for-him baby toys, stroller, carseat, crib, anything. These are self-explanatory, of course. I, as a second daughter, didn’t have a bicycle bought solely for me until I was 19.

4. A curious disconnect between delaying his babyhood, and pushing him to independence quicker. As for the babying: James was in a crib until he was just past three, whereas we tossed Daniel in a twin-sized bed at 2. (But that has more to do with me being cheap than anything else, now that I think about it. James needed the crib; I wasn’t going to buy another, and my sister gave us a hand-me-down bed. Done). I also still cheat quite a bit and help him get dressed when he knows how to put on his socks and such himself. He’s my baby!

But in other ways, James has moved faster: to a cup from a bottle; to a regular chair at the table from a high chair.

Will you allow me a little indulgence here? I adore my firstborn. No, adore isn’t the right word. I’m still awed and cowed by him, amazed by him, besotted with every inch and freckle of him.

But my James? My baby? My second sweetheart? He is my heart.

Here’s the difference: When I check on my sleeping boys at night, I pull Daniel’s covers up, re-shelve the books he has scattered all over his quilt, stroke his hair, and whisper “I love you” in his ear (he usually wipes his ear with his hand, a trace of irritation in his sleeping face). In James’ room? I have to fight the urge to crawl into his bed.

And that’s the upside of Second Child Syndrome. Too bad he’ll never know.

Me, in fifth grade. Back when you got a free comb on picture day.

The other day, both boys came home with the familiar order form and info sheet in their backpacks: Gear up, mom and dad, it’s almost Picture Day!

I hate picture day.

To be precise, I don’t hate the day itself, since I’m not, literally or otherwise,  in the picture. True to my meanness and aversion to being a Joiner, I don’t even volunteer to herd kids to the all-purpose room or comb hair and fix bows.

What I hate is the form itself (murky, impenetrable); the packages offered (many choices, none of which make sense); and even the modifications you can make to the packages offered (again, none of which make sense, because none of them modify the packages to the point where they make sense, at least to me). The packages all cost too much for what they include. In the last year or two, the company’s started offering what seems like a great advantage: a photo CD of your kid, so you can (gasp!) download and print or have printed your own shots. But guess what? You can only buy the CD as part of a package. The most expensive package, the one that includes something like three 8X10′s (I’m sorry, does anyone aside from a few grandparents, my own parents not included, even want an 8X10 anymore?).

Those packages also include weird sizes. You know how a standard photo size these days is the nice, desk-top-frame friendly 4X6? No such thing here! You can get 5X7s, of course, and those anachronistic 8X10s, but no 4X6′s.

But hey, how about eighteen inch-and-a-half by two-and-a-half inches? Really — 18 of them?

Gah. I won’t go on. And in case you were wondering if I was protecting the innocence of the company in question, I’m quite happy to name names. It’s LifeTouch. And they come back in the spring!

My question is this: Why do we fall for the pitch?

These reasons not to fall for it are obvious, but bear repeating:

We all have cameras now. Many of us have very good cameras. Even our cheaper cameras take good pictures. That was not always the case, of course. On my desk right now is a 5X7 black and white photo of my grandmother with my dad, when he was two. A photographer came to the house and persuaded my normally quite frugal grandmother to spring for some photos. He must have plied her with that age-old effective strategy: “But Madam, you look so lovely in this photo! So youthful! And your son! How adorable!” All of which is true, but you know. My point, though, is that these old-time traveling shutterbugs had one major ace in the hole: that set of photos of my dad at 2 are probably the only extant photos of my dad at two. Want to know how many photos I have of Daniel at two? So do I.

Here’s that pic of my grandma and dad:

Brooklyn, circa 1938. And this was probably an outtake of the day's photo session!

Everyone we know takes pictures of our kids. Lots and lots of them. I challenge you, right now, to compare a stunning unposed shot you probably have tucked in an album, with one you had taken at Sears Portrait Studio, or its equivalent. I took Daniel to Sears exactly one time for photos, at 18 months. I felt like I should — other moms shlepped to the photo studio on a monthly basis! The shots are cute, of course, with my baby’s wispy curls that are no more, his chubby feet and sweet baby face. But I don’t even have that in a frame. What I do have framed? A shot we took of him at 9 months, on a park bench near where we used to live. It’s so… perfectly Daniel:

This is exactly how Daniel still looks, minus the chub.

Whereas the Sears shots? They’re Sears shots. No more, no less. And certainly no essense of Daniel.

And yet I’m writing the checks to Life Touch. This is the last time, though. I’m doing it because it’s James’ kindergarten year, and because as the second son he’s gotten short shrift photographically, even given our shutter-happiness. And because the grandparents do still like them.

Next year, all LifeTouch is getting from me,I promise, is just enough for the class photo. Then I’m going to spend some time sifting through the four gazillion shots either I or my relatives take of my sons, find the best, and make copies (for cheap! Online!) for the grandparents. There. Done.

School photos are an anchronism. And as my friend Sandra pointed out, unlike when we were kids, you don’t even get a free comb anymore.

If I were as mean a mommy as I profess, if I were so hooked on schedules and eager to turn my little babies into independent boys-to-men, if I so valued my me-time and my work ethic, then I wouldn’t want a third child quite so badly, would I?

But I do.

And I’m not going to have one. The reasons not to range from the silly to the sublime. Here they are, in no particular order:

• I’m 43 years old. I don’t think that’s too old to have a baby. And in fact, my instinct, my health, and my family history indicate that I’m likely as fertile now as I was at 36 when I had Daniel. But I remember the difference in how I felt pregnant at 36, and pregnant again a mere two years later. I’m not equipped any longer for that level of wrecked.

• I already had two C-sections, and (though I don’t want to gross you out with the details), let’s just say that I can feel the ridge of scar tissue under the surface scar, and I don’t like to think about what a third surgery would do to it. I tried like hell not to have the second, but ended up going under the knife again, and I’m not sure I have the energy to find the one health professional out there who’d risk letting a 43-year-old double-section-gal labor.

• We happen to have health insurance right now (not a given in our lives, or in this country as it stands), but it’s not terrific insurance. We had “good” insurance when I had James and that STILL cost us $6,000 out of pocket. I mean, he’s worth every penny, but still…

• We have small cars. (I said some reasons were silly, right?) With a third, I’d need another row of seats, and I’d have to be dragged kicking and screaming to do so. Plus, we can’t really afford a new car right now.

• I’m freelance. I don’t have the luxury of maternity leave (and I use the word “luxury” with a heavy coat of irony, seeing as how 12 weeks of mostly unpaid leave is more barbaric than luxurious). I’d have to do what I did when I had James; resume my work within weeks. (Typical conversation with editor back then: “Is that your baby crying? Do you have to get him?” “No, he’s fine. It’s fine.”) While I may fantasize about the idea of sending my two older boys off to school while I bond with the new little one, letting him nurse while I write, I know it wouldn’t really be that way, and one or both of us would likely be crying a lot.

• And even more selfish/economic reasons: I finally stopped paying for childcare now that James is going to kindergarten. I don’t want to buy any more cases of Costco diapers and wipes. Thing is, and this really sticks in my craw, we can “afford” another child in the long term, but not so much in the short term.

I’m smart enough to make the totally obvious connection between this surge of baby lust and what’s going on in my family right now: a mini-babyboom has expanded our extended group by two new babies in the last three months — and there’s another one on the way this fall.

Yesterday, I visited the newest, my one-week-old, first-cousin-once-removed, Martin:

Me holding week-old baby Martin

Also in attendance was my second-newest first-cousin-once-removed, three-month-old Robert:

My sister holding Martin, me with baby Robert.

Martin’s tiny size (it was like cradling a sleeping kitten, or a roasted chicken; he barely breaks 6 pounds) made holding him surreal, because my babies started out bigger than this. He never opened his eyes while I held him, and the usual chaos of a baby visit at an already child- and baby-centric house  swirled around us. (Aside from me and my two boys, there were Martin, his parents, and his three big sisters; my other cousin, her husband and the toddler and preschooler they have in addition to Robert; my sister and her youngest daughter; my mom; my aunt and uncle; two au pairs; and two elderly poodles.)

Later, I held baby Robert, the three-month-old, who at 18 lbs. triggered a trip down memory lane, reminding me how it felt to heft my Daniel at that age, when he was all rolls of fat and drooling, toothless grin.

When the head-spinning nature of a few hours in that cacaphonous company died down, sometime last night, in the silence that was left, I felt an ache so strong I started crying on the couch. It wasn’t because I wanted another baby, though that’s part of it — the elemental urge that any woman who’s smelled the sweet head of her own newborns recognizes. It was because I knew I couldn’t, and wouldn’t.

When I had my newborns, I wasn’t blissful. I couldn’t let myself drown in their weirdness and their newness and their bottomless needs. I loved them, but I mostly survived them. (I wrote about this once, in an essay for American Baby called “The Big Lie.”) It’s only in the remembering, such as when I pulled out the black and white marble notebook I used for Daniel’s baby book (I was doublechecking that he was indeed as chunked out as cousin Robert at 3 months), that I realize how fascinated I was by my babies’ growth, their discoveries, their antics.

But I can’t go through the non-blissful part again — for the reasons of age and of exhaustion, of finances and self-hood — just for the smell of a new baby’s head, or just for the times I watched a 6-month-old figure out how to get across a room on his belly, or an 11-month-old work out how to take a step, or decide which of the two toys he has clutched in his fat fists he wants to drop in order to pick up a third.

I recognized that dull look of fear, pain, and exhaustion in my cousin’s eyes, baby Martin’s mom. Did I mention she already has three children, daughters who are 10, 8, and 5? Did I mention that she’s 42 years old? Did I mention that I’m probably one of the few people close to her who’s willing to agree with her that it sucks, to agree with her that while the baby himself is beautiful and perfect and a miracle, that meeting his needs means putting off her own, again?

Being that only person — the person who can ooh and ahh with the rest of them and breathe in the baby smell with the best of them, but who can still feel the dread and the fear — is part of my “mean” mommyhood. The practicality gets me, every time. It’s my mommy-burden, knowing precisely what my limits are.

And apparently, finally, really, my limit is two.

When did kids start drinking out of bags?

Years and years ago, well before I had kids, I was hanging around in my sister’s newly refinished basement, playing some board games with two of her kids and my dad. My niece and nephew, Tara and Nick, were drinking juice out of those foil pouches, like Capri Sun (which now, by the way, are being recycled into adorable purses and tote bags by an enterprising company called Terracycle). Anyway, both those kids, being kids, had a hard time sitting still. They were scooting around the table where we were playing, hanging upside down from the couch — all while sipping from their pouches.

Suddenly something occurred to me: There were no juice boxes or pouches, much less sippy cups, when my siblings and I were their age. So I turned to my dad, and asked, “When we were kids, how did we drink juice?”

“Out of a cup. At the table. Like a human,” he answered.

Hmmm…

A number of years later, at my baby shower, I received a basket full of childproofing gadgets — outlet covers, cabinet locks, a contraption whose sole purpose seemed to be to render your toilet virtually unusable without an advanced engineering degree. We didn’t end up using any of them. First, we lived in such an old (read: unrenovated) apartment that we only had three or four outlets in the whole place, so all of them were already quite full, thanks very much. Second, the cabinet locks didn’t work with the type of (cheap, builder-grade) cabinets in our kitchen. Third, I was not about to lock up my toilet. Please, we only had one!

By the time Daniel was mobile enough to get into things he possibly shouldn’t, he just kind of…didn’t. We had two bookcases in the living room, and we’d already cleared out the bottom shelves to stow baskets with his toys, which he happily accessed himself. Not only did he not strew our CDs over the floor, neither did he ever stick a frozen waffle into the VCR.  Do kids actually do that? You hear about it, kids jamming foodstuffs into VCRs, but I always wondered if it was an urban legend, or if the fact that Daniel didn’t do it made him weird.

Then again, he may not have tried to feed the electronic equipment because he never consumed waffles, or anything else, while wandering about in reach of the VCR.

He ate in his high chair. Pulled up to the table. Like a human.

I’m not anti-childproofing, but there’s a tipping point at which well-meaning parents slide from commonsense moves (like relocating dangerous substances out of reach, or buckling a baby into a carseat, neither of which, incidentally, my parents did for me) into a sort of childproofing mania. You can actually hire a professional childproofing consultant who’ll come to your house and assess what needs to be done. I hear they crawl around at kid-level, looking for death lurking in every corner (and charging you appropriately for fixing what’s patently wrong with your home). I imagine them going around with their clipboard and a serious expression, handing you the estimate, then going out to their car and laughing all the way to the bank.

Any of you get the One Step Ahead catalog? I do. They have some good stuff in there, from top-quality carseats to breastpumps. But their real stock in trade is the childproofing paraphernalia that you just have to have. And if you have to have it but don’t have it, that means your house is obviously impossibly dangerous. Good God, how can you raise your child in that death trap? (See Death Trap Protector, on page 14.)

We used two things to childproof, apart from the outlet covers, which we did employ when we moved into a bigger home with more outlets; the boys pulled them out and used them as toys; and apart from a gate that roped off my husband’s home office, which was doorless and full of very enticing officey objects. Those two things:

1. Physical intervention. If the boy started crawling toward something he shouldn’t, we’d intercept him. Try this if you have a newly crawling baby — it’s hilarious. Just pick him up, mid-crawl, turn him around, and set him back down. He keeps going in the new direction, like a windup toy. Who says babies are no fun?!.
2. A sharp”No!”, which tended to make the baby plop onto his butt and look up at us, like, “what? I wasn’t going for the bleach! Jeez, Mom!” But he stopped.

But we didn’t lock toilets or cover tub faucets or buy those weird gates that turn your living room into a toddler-safe OK Corral. And no way, ever, never would I spend a dime on this:

Fun with fruit!

This being a mesh bag with a handle. It’s called the Baby Safe Feeder Starter Kit (good heavens, there’s more to it?) You pop in a piece of fruit or whatever, and your child can gum and mash and suck out the food through the mesh. You know, so he doesn’t choke.

Naturally I don’t want my child to choke on his food. Or fall down the stairs, or burn himself on the stove, or play chemistry set with the cleaning supplies. But I do believe that things like this mesh bag lull parents into thinking they can eliminate risk with one giant order from the childproofing porn magazine, I mean, the One Step Ahead catalog.

Because, you know–with that mesh bag? Um, whatever happened to cutting up your kid’s fruit? And serving it to him, under your watchful eye?

At the table? Like a human.

Have you read this article in the New York Times yet? It’s by writer and psychologist Alison Gopnik, and it’s gotten a bunch of media play in the last few days, because it’s about something supposedly revolutionary: Babies, Gopnik asserts, are quite a bit smarter than we think.

I’m pretty sure I knew that already. I mean, I knew it already because it’s not exactly new news (though the research Gopnik cites, some of it her own, from the University of California, Berkeley, where she’s a psychology professor, is new). I know that science has discovered amazing things about a baby’s inborn capabilities, and how those capabilities blow out of the water our previous beliefs about newborns–that they are basically inert lumps, taking in food from one end and pooping it out at the other, little more than  adorable amoeba. But I also knew it because I’ve seen my own babies at work, so to speak.

The first time I held James, my younger boy (well, maybe the second time; the first time, I was still numb from unwanted C-section surgery to remember much), I saw something familiar in his eyes. There was a knowing glint in those newborn eyes, I swear. “This one’s trouble,” I said to my husband later. James was sharp as a tack from the get-go, and he hasn’t let up since. Here he is, at two months (a different mom would claim he’s counting to one with that raised pinkie!):

My smart baby James. Just what is he planning in that elastic brain of his?

All of which makes me feel better about the fact that I haven’t tried all that hard in the intervening years to “boost” my babies’ learning.

The biggest example is, of course, Mommy & Me or Gymboree and other, similar classes meant to give babies a chubby leg up on a lifetime of learning. I didn’t do it. The only foray I made into that whole arena were a few free Mommy & Me-style classes at my local library, which I’ve mentioned before on this blog. I never really liked them much. The woman who ran the classes was a little too into the whole thing, for one; but more important, when it came to the craft portion of the session, she seemed to expect us moms to do the gluing and the folding and whatever, and I frankly am not into that kind of mom-directed art project stuff.

Mostly, I didn’t follow up on other classes because they didn’t fit into our schedule. At the time, we were new to our town, and I was working three days a week at my old editing job in the city (Daniel, then one, was home with a nanny). The baby and I had two weekdays together, and no car (the library happened to be in walking distance, or I wouldn’t have done that, either). We stuck close to home by necessity, but also by temperament — mine. I’ve never been a joiner. Also, though I can’t underestimate baby classes’ value for breaking up the tedium of life at home with a baby, I’ve always been skeptical of anyone who asserts that babies need them. At best, I find all those classes a crashing bore; at worst they felt like a replay of junior high, but with babies in tow. I never quite fit in; I wasn’t a full-time working mom or a stay-at-home mom, but a curious hybrid of both. (See what I mean about junior high? How would I find the right kind of friends? Easier to just avoid the whole thing.)

Gopnik makes the point in her piece (and the research bears this out) that babies and young children (say, under 4 or 5) can’t focus on just one thing, and that in fact, that’s not how they learn best. Their brains are elastic (I love that image!), filled with neuronal connections that allow them to explore and take in what their senses offer them with no preconceived ideas of how things should look, taste, react, feel or sound like. It’s all new, it’s all stimulating, and it’s all good. Even preschoolers aren’t really “learning” as much from the journal-keeping and flash-card-working that many of them do in school (or at home!). They’re learning by hanging around with their peers in the classroom, or with their siblings and parents back at home; by watching, by listening, and above all by playing.

Another Mean Mommy relief moment! My instinct (to not be a mommy-joiner; to not feel I have to get on the boost-baby’s-brain bandwagon; to do my own thing at home even if all I’m stimuating my child with is the sight of me folding towels or doing a Pilates DVD) was on target.

Gopnik mentions a famous experiment in which children and adults were asked to watch a video of two people tossing a ball back and forth, and count how many tosses they saw. Some time into the video, someone in a big gorilla suit walks slowly across the set. Guess who notices the gorilla and who remains focused on the counting task?

So I guess you can say by not doing more classes (and by using those insane Baby Einstein DVDs not as learning tools but as a mommy-needs-a-shower-break) I’m giving my kids a chance to see the many gorillas walking across the scene that they may otherwise have missed.

Do you think classes make your baby smarter?