To 3 or not to 3
This is a picture of me as a baby. The person holding me is my uncle.
I don’t know why I look so angry. My husband says I still make that sour face. A lot.
Here’s another.
I’m with my mom in this one. Apparently I didn’t move a lot as a kid. Some things never change.
Excuse the quality of the pics. They’re pretty old.
No, I’m not old. Just the pics are.
My neighbor from across the street recently had her fifth child. She gets out of the house so infrequently that I found out she had been pregnant two weeks after she brought the baby home from the hospital.
She’s a little on the religious side. She likes to tell me that children are a blessing, birth control is a no no, and that we should have as many kids as God decides to give us.
Okay, Michelle Duggar. You do that. I’m going to hop on the first train back to the real world, where we have something called a condom.
As my boys get older, the question of So are you going to have any more? becomes inevitable. I’ve heard it quite a few times already. Everyone seems to think that we need a daughter.
My sister once asked me Wouldn’t you love to have a girl? to which I replied Not as much as I’d love to have a life.
If you listen closely, I’ll tell you a secret. Ready? Okay, here we go.
Kids. Are. A LOT. Of work.
Above is the picture of my eldest at around three months old. Isn’t he such a doll?
But behind those chubby cheeks and fat wrists lies a natural inclination to be hyper. And naughty.
Here is Child 2 at 1.5 months of age.
His story is the most famous post on this blog.
He’s the opposite of his brother. He loves to eat and to sleep. He also did this thing as a newborn where he would pull a fistful of his own hair and then scream at the top of his lungs. That was cute but I really hoped it didn’t reflect on his level of intelligence.
When you put the two of them together, you get 4 ounces of getting along, 3 ounces of fighting, and 1 ounce of He’s so stupid and annoying and I wish he was like Mini!
Mini is my brother’s deceased pet cat. He was also my kids’ first experience with the concepts of death and dying. I was hoping for some maturity and understanding from them when we mentioned Mini’s passing, but all they got out of it was that he had gone away and was never coming back and hey, that’s a good idea, let’s send my annoying brother there, too.
My kids are my world. They might drive me crazy, but they also make me laugh.
Like when my four year old comes up to me, points to my breasts, and asks Which one makes ice cream?
I’m guessing that’s some sort of reference to breast milk but I was laughing too hard to inquire.
As much as I love my kids, I’m not crazy about the idea of giving them more siblings. My experience with raising infants hasn’t been the greatest. It was challenging, to say the least.
While all the other new parents sailed smoothly, we hit iceberg after iceberg.
Smash. Acid reflux.
Crash. Inability to nurse.
Wham. Being blessed with the one baby in the world that didn’t seem to require any sleep whatsoever. His idea of nap time was an extra long blink.
The biggest problem of them all was my kids’ inability to put on weight. They would gain ounces, not pounds. Both were big babies at birth and in utero, thanks to my doing a really good job at the eating for two part, but my husband was a rail thin child and genetics eventually took over in full force.
Difficulty in gaining weight is a problem I never had. I can look at food and gain weight. Even embryonic me must’ve been on the heavier side.
Not my boys. They both eat like crazy and not one bit of it turns into baby fat. They have the metabolism of an Olympic gold medalist.
While it’s great for them as kids, as babies it was a nightmare. Infancy is the one and only time where fat equals cute. Kid one was diagnosed with failure to thrive and kid two with the audacity to completely fall of the charts.
I know now that children of Indian descent are naturally more petite. But as a new parent, any minor deviation from normal was the end of the world. And that’s what it felt like.
It’s tough to look back at their baby pictures and not remember a time when I felt like a total failure at the whole mothering thing.
An especially low point was when a cold ass bitch commented So are you feeding your kids at all or are you eating their food as well?
Apparently she meant it as a joke. I meant it as a joke, too, when I told her her husband’s tits were bigger than hers.
I’m in no hurry to flunk the test for the third time and neither is my husband. Sure, number 3 might be the charm, but higher powers seem to be agreeing with us on two being the magic number. Meaning my ob-gyn and my cardiologist. The only way I will be allowed to deliver any future child is through cesarean surgery and the pills I pop for my tachycardia are harmful to a growing fetus.
Let’s see. Stop taking potentially life saving medicine and be carved up like a Christmas turkey, or shut down the baby making factory and be a good mom to the kids I already have?
If anything I’d say God was telling me to keep my uterus to myself. Okay, God, I get your message. Sheesh. Now stop sending me those nightmares where I’m giving birth to the Antichrist.
The View Through The Window 