When I was still pregnant friends and relatives always told me that ‘two is ten’ – once you have two kids, you may as well have ten. I have to say that so far I disagree. While no part of me thinks that two kids are easy, I’m somehow finding it easier than only one kid. Here’s why: With one kid, there is still some semblance of freedom, because I am married and my hubby is very hands on, so our ratio was 2:1. We outnumbered our kid. So we often passed him off:

You hold him, I have to pee.

Okay now you hold him, I’m going to fold laundry.

Can you take him now? I want to call my mom.

Your turn, I have to have a shower.

Of course in there we had nice family moments where all three of us frolicked and behaved like a unit, but if I say it like it is, the truth was that single-child parenting amounts to a game of hot-potato; one parent has the kid, the other doesn’t. And – here comes one of those moments where I admit something bad – sometimes it felt like I got addicted to the pawn off, that after a day or afternoon with my lovely little boy I’d be jonesing for the hand off.

And in a strange way, that was oppressive. The fact that I was only one step removed from the freedom of my pre-kids years was oppressive, I was always clawing my way back to it.

So now, we have two kids and there is no pawn off, or at least a lot less pawning off, because it’s much harder to feel okay about leaving my hubby with a baby dangling off him and a toddler running away from him. Sometimes I do it, but not without a real sense of what an a**hole I am. And when he does it, the guilt is epic:

I guess you can go play soccer. No, really, go. *Sigh*. We’ll be okay. I’m sooooo tired.  What am I going to feed them? But really, go.

Okay, so I’m being mildly facetious.

The bottom line has been that having two kids is easier because I gave in, I really just gave in, I surrendered myself to it fully. 

And while it’s madness, the fact that I can try to pawn them off is actually a bit of a relief.

Now there are two hot potatoes; two precious, funny little hot potatoes. So we hold one each and juggle like mad.

Also, blogging is sort of scary, especially when people start to comment and reply and commiserate. I loved it but it freaked me out.  Is that normal?

Anyway, my new blogging strategy is slower out the gates for a longer race.

More to come…

You have a sense of what you think it might be like to stay home with your kid(s) before you have them. I’ll do yoga! I’ll make wonderful meals. The house will be spotless! I’ll write letters to my friends!

Um, yeah. Not quite.

 It’s 9:48am and my son is napping and after I write 250 or so words, here’s what I’ll do in descending order of importance. The descending order of importance is the key to success in stay-at-homehood, since the kid is bound to wake up and cut your list off at some point.

 So, in a very particular order:

 1. Use the loo. Trying to use the loo with an 11-month old in the room with you is enough to induce a very painful case of hemorrhoids. You’re in the middle of things and suddenly he’s got the vanity drawer open and is playing with a bottle of Tylenol. Not good. So the loo is #1. Ah, to s**t in peace.

2. Shower. No. Wait. No time for that. Instead, deodorant and a face wash. Maybe some face cream. Perhaps a teeth brush. Proceed at frantic pace; no time to linger.

3. Eat. A bowl of Cheerios and a banana is the new gourmet.

4. Check email. Write 6 word replies. Sample: Can’t write busy will call later.

5. Clean up. Start with dishes. End with food encrusted high chair, which sends me into a fit of despair. I know, in my heart, that only a bottle of bleach and four hours of scrubbing would truly get that high chair clean. So instead, I suck it up and sit my kid down in a pool of crumbs from his yesterday’s dinner.

6. Avoid feeling overwhelmed. (This isn’t actually a task, let alone a possibility. Just thought I’d add it anyway).

7. If he’s still napping, I might actually change into a pair of jeans and comb my hair. When I get this far on my list, I feel amazing. With my jeans on and my hair combed, I make Angelina Jolie look like Shrek. (Not exactly true, but it’s all in how you feel – beauty is inner.)

On that note, time to sign off and move to #2 on the list. Deodorant, here I come.

 Will post again soon.

After all, how could babies incite competition? Aren’t they supposed to make us quieter, gentler people?

Um, no. 

It actually started in pregnancy. As soon as mine was announced, women circled me, trying to recruit me to their particular team. There are lots of pregnancy teams to choose from: The Basketball Bellies, the Gain-All-You-Wants,  the Go-Natural-or-Go-Homes, the Epidurals-or-Busts…

Some women will go to great lengths to get you to join their team. You look great! You look big! You look small! One woman told me I was gaining all the weight in my ass and if I kept it up, I’d give birth to a hippo cub. Another told me I wasn’t gaining enough weight and if I kept it up, I’d give birth to a chia pet. To others, I was negligent for using a midwife at the hospital. When I told a pro-midwife friend that I hadn’t ruled out an epidural, she told me I’d never walk again if I let the bad doctor stab me in the back with that poison.

You can’t win! The only thing to do is learn to ignore the comments. Trust your body and your own choices. But let me tell you, it’s hard to ignore someone telling you your ass is fat. Hard to resist the urge to unleash a fat ass whooping on those dumb enough to say such things.

So I avoided picking a team. But of course, pregnancy is just training camp. The real Baby Games don’t begin until the squirt is actually born.

I understand the natural need to compete. I am by nature a very competitive person. I like to win. I like those around me to win too (unless they’re playing against me, of course). But I was gobsmacked by the competition my tiny son incited right off the bat.

Most people would say women don’t compete, they compare. Nuh-uh. We compete. Before kids, we might compete over our jobs, our bodies, our partners, our social circles, our accomplishments. But babies take it to a whole new level. Babies we create and we rear, and we see them as the ultimate reflection of ourselves. Parenthood is the perfect breeding ground for competition.

Welcome to the Baby Games. 

Is your son holding up his head? No?????? Hmmmm. Mine did at 3-days old. O really? Well my son smiled at 2-weeks. Good for him! But that’s nothing. My daughter laughed at barely a month old. Wow! I’m so happy for you. Yes, yes. I’m sure my son will be reading before he’s 2. He’s just brilliant. I’m sooooo glad I had a girl. They’re much calmer and smarter. O, really? Because I desperately wanted a boy. They’re much heartier and way less manipulative.

My mother warned me from Day One to boycott the Baby Games. You’ll never win, she said. People choose to compete in fields where they know they’ll come out on top. If they can’t beat you in milestones, they’ll get you in growth. Or vice versa.

Still, it was hard to resist. At every turn there seemed to be points of comparison. In the early days it’s all about smiling, laughing, sitting, crawling. Then it becomes about babbling, talking, walking, playing. Once friend, who’s eldest daughter is 2, told me she looks at other kids who aren’t talking or playing at her daughter’s level and thinks there’s something wrong with that kid.

I’m not being judgmental, she actually said, I just wouldn’t want to be their parent.

Jeeeeeez.

I admit to partaking. It made me terribly insecure that my son wasn’t babbling much by seven months. But he sat up alone at 5 months, a point I made to many friends with babies. I could feel it welling in me, this need to compare, to see where my kid fell. I even read the “Is your Baby Gifted?” chapter in our baby book and looked to my son’s behaviour to see if he fit the bill.

One afternoon, I sat and played with my son. He pulled his favorite rattle to his face and examined it. His little blue eyes crossed from the effort, and the drool pooled around his neck, a glistening coat of saliva on his soft white skin. I watched my cross-eyed, drool-soaked darling and thought:

You are Perfect. I’m the one with the big f&#(@& problem.

Here is my precious little boy, trying so hard to make his way, learning more in a day than I learn in a year, absorbing every detail of his new world, growing, and loving me with all his heart despite my own massive faults. Why do I care if he crawls a little earlier but talks a little later than his peers? To that point, why do I care if the precious babies around him crawl later or talk earlier? Can’t we all just get along?

The final straw came at a dinner party I recently attended. A friend, who’s baby girl was barely 11 months at the time, told the crowd that his daughter could say 15 different words. Every parent in the room considered this. Fifteen words at 11 months. Was he bragging? Certainly some people it the room took it as such.

Like what? said another venom-spewing father. Ba? Bi? Bo? Da? Ma? Pa? This isn’t Scrabble… you don’t get to count all the two letter words.

Ouch.

This exchange was the final straw for me. On the car ride home, I vowed to my husband that I was going to take my mother’s sage advice and boycott the Baby Games from then on. There is no clean win in the Baby Games; all victories come at the expense of someone else’s little person. And that’s totally and utterly wrong.

So I boycott them! No more competing, no more comparing. All babies are perfect in their own way. My son is his own independent little man who will grow and learn and develop at his own pace.

Besides, soon I won’t have time for these trifling sort of things. I’ll be too busy once my kid starts walking, which should be any day.

I know… he’s early. That’s my boy!

WARNING: This blog entry contains sexual content. If you are offended by such content and a humorous approach to such content, do not read on…

I feel a degree of anonymity here, so I’m going to broach this topic, this the scariest of topics:

Sex after baby or babies.

Yet another one of those things you swear won’t be an issue in your marriage. You swear sex will quickly return to normal. And then you use your sex organ to squeeze out a human head, and suddenly you understand why sex after marriage is an issue to so many.

Before I gave birth, my mother-in-law gave me a book called Babyproofing your Marriage. This is a guide written by three women on how to save your marriage from the tsunami that is children. One day you’re sunning on the beach, just the two of you, your marriage young and supple, tanned and rested and well sexed. Then the water breaks and you’re trying to keep afloat, grasping for each other as the waves of parenthood yank you apart. Suddenly, sleep is the new sex and cuddling is about as x-rated as it gets.
 

Nice. Again, I digress…

Anyhoo, did I mention my mother-in-law gave this book to me? I fixate on this point because there was actually a chapter, an entire chapter, devoted to blow jobs. This is the very scientific term they use for it too: Blow Jobs. Not oral sex, not mouth-on-privates, not fellatio, but blow jobs.

I turned to my husband in bed and said: Your mom just gave me a book about blow jobs.

O, to have a snapshot of the look on his face.

On our first home visit, when my son was only 12 hours old, my midwife told me a story of a couple who had sex in the hospital room to celebrate the birth of their child. This, I said to her, has to be an urban legend. There is just no way. And as urban legends go, if I had to pick one, I say I’d be more likely to give up both my kidneys and lie in a bathtub of ice or pick up a hitchhiker with a hook for a hand than opt for post-labour sex.

By all means, I love sex. But I hated those kinds of stories. O, one friend told me, I called my doctor two weeks after giving birth to see if it was okay to have sex again. Another friend told me she and her rabid dog of a husband only waited a week. Thankfully, though, most of my friends fell into the same timeline as my husband and me:

Month 1: Touch me and die.
Month 2: Kiss me; touch my breasts and die.
Month 3: A bottle of wine; a bigger bottle of KY; an attempt; touch me and die.
Month 4: A bottle of wine; a bigger bottle of KY; an attempt; touch me if you dare.
Month 5: No wine; still lots of KY; hey, I remember this, sort of.
Month 6: Still lots of KY; okay, this is nice, I remember you.

We’re in Month 11 now and while we do our best, things have certainly not returned to normal. Sometimes it hurts, and sometimes, as one friend so eloquently put it, it feels like we’re throwing a hot dog down a hallway. I do my Kegels everyday!

Sometimes I want to, most of the time I still don’t. It probably doesn’t help that I’m still nursing. My son treats my boobs like a dairy bar, and dairy bars don’t a good sex tool make.

The good news is, I love my husband to death, I still pine for him, I still look at him and think he’s handsome, hot, sexy. We’re not having sex three times a week, but we’re a lot closer than we’ve ever been. There’s something to be said for that.

I noticed after reading the comments that my previous two posts were both at least somewhat of the male bashing variety. Now, this was not intended. I am not a male basher. I am a feminist, but I’ve always been a feminist who believes that me are our friends, our mates, our partners (if we swing that way), our equals. Feminism is not about raising or lowering one sex, it’s about women finding ways to be who they need to be.

Suffice it to say, I love men. I married one, I gave birth to a mini-one. Men rule my world, and I love it.

In high school, I’d show up 15 minutes late to history class, slide into the back row beside the other delinquents and slump into my chair. What’s wrong with you? someone would ask.

Man, I’d say, I’m tired.

Fast forward half a decade to university. Saturday evening spent in the company of my gaggle of roommates, a dance floor and three bottle of jaggermeister. Stumble home at 3am, strip off my mini-skirt and pour myself into bed. Wake up at noon the next day, roll out of bed and into my track suit, slide onto the couch next to one of my roommates. What’s wrong with you? someone would ask.

Man, I’d say, I’m tired.

Another half-decade later, and I’m in front of my own classroom, tossing sidelong glares at the delinquents arriving 15 minutes late and sliding into the back row. After a day spent running from classroom to classroom, marking essays, putting out teenaged fires, I’d slump on my desk.  What’s wrong with you? someone would ask.

Man, I’d say, I’m tired.

In the first three months of my pregnancy, I’d come home from work, snatch the ice cream from the freezer and hurl myself on the couch. By the time Jeopardy rolled around at 7:30, I’d turn to my husband.

Man, I’d say, I’m so tired.

And so in my cumulative life experiences, I figured I knew tired. Those who became mothers before me warned me that I knew nothing, but I doubted them. How bad could it be? I mean, life is tiring. A baby can’t be any worse.

Mother of God, do I know better now. 

And so, let me be clear about this: All things pre-baby are not tiring. They are simply taxing, toilsome, nigglesome, bothersome… in the same way a crossword puzzle or extra-long traffic light might be. To those of you who’ve fought in wars or performed 38-hours straight of surgery to separate conjoined twins, I say you might get it. Otherwise, I say recognize. I say respect. Represent. All the moms in the world say YEAH! We know tired, man. The rest of you don’t.

People refer to the new baby time as sleep deprived, exhausting, strenuous. But I think there needs to be a better word, for none of these do it any justice. Perhaps I will write to the people at Oxford dictionary and suggest refucausted (as in: really fu#&# exhausted). But they’re probably all men, so they won’t get it.

(I’m sorry men, but for the most part, you don’t get it. Please call me sexist. Please do! I hope I am being sexist, for I can’t wait to live in a world where this is no longer at least somewhat true. I love my husband and he is a helpful, engaged father. But he doesn’t get it.

But I digress…)

Tiredness has recently caused me to:

• Leave the house and get all the way to the grocery store in my slippers (hey, they have soles, so it was an easy mistake).
• Take ice cubes and a teething soother from the freezer at the same time. Drop the teething soother in my water bottle and the ice cubes in my purse. Realize my mistake 20 minutes later.  
• Forget, momentarily,  my husband’s first name.
• Show up on time for my dentist appointment. Right time, wrong day.

To name only a few.

 So to the mothers (and yes, yes – the fathers) of the world with new babies, sleepless babies, teething babies, sleepless toddlers…

Man, I say for us all, I’m refucausted.

 Okay, on to the reason I sat down to write. Man Colds.

What is a Man Cold?

A man cold is the male version of Acute viral nasopharyngitis, commonly known as the common cold.

My husband suffers with some regularity from man colds. In his defence, he works with children. As he walks down the school hallway on any given winter day, he might be chased by a number of virus coated twerps who use droplets of their green snot to chart their way through the universe. Here I was, here is my snot. 

So he catches a lot of colds. Then I catch them from him. But he catches the Man Cold version, far more debilitating than anything I’ve ever caught.

As colds go, worse only than my husband is my father. The only thing I remember about being sick as a kid was the efforts undertaken, at all costs, to avoid passing whatever ailed me on to my father. For I knew what would happen should he wake with a sniffle with any sort of timely proximity to my own.

You, he’s say through snot, you gave me this.

When my mother got sick, she picked up a pack of kleenex on her way home from work, stuffed it in her purse, moaned after an especially large sneeze and otherwise went about her life.

When my father was sick, our little familial world grinded to a halt. His moans, akin to some kind of death rattle, wafted out of my parents’ bedroom. My mother would emerge, her hands full of empty bowls and cups, and close the door behind her. We stood wide-eyed in the hallway, clutching our teddies and wondering whether we’d ever see my father again.

Don’t go in there, she’d say, rolling her eyes.

At night, I swear I could hear him through the walls, moaning, groaning, begging the virus for mercy.

Twenty odd years later, I live with a new, super-virus version of the Man Cold. When my hubby gets sick, he stops at the grocer and buys 6 boxes of tissue, a Club Pak. He searches the medicine cabinet for boxes that say the word Cold in bold. He lies in bed beside me, tossing and lamenting the throes of his disease, breathing through his mouth, his hairline rimmed with sweat.

I swear, I really do want to feel bad for him and nurse him like a good wife, but I look at him instead and think: Gross.

By the second or third day my patience wears off and I start with the Man Cold accusations. My husband takes this as well as my father used to take it when my mother hurled the same accusation at him, which is to say not very well.

It’s not the same cold you had! he’ll insist. This is WAY worse!

mmmmmhmmmmm. 

 We are all original. But blogging isn’t. Nonetheless, I digress…

 It has snowed endlessly where I am and I’m still in my pajamas at 9:41am reeking vaguely of unwashed armpits and hoping my precious son will nap for at least another hour. Not because I don’t love him. Let’s get that out of the way right off the bat: I love my son, perhaps more than I’ve ever loved anything, a lot of the time so much that it hurts, and my moments of joy with him are exquisite. So all things said herein must be, always, taken knowing full well that beneath my ramblings, my struggles, my moments of self-doubt, sadness and just plain boredom, is a vast sea of love.

 About me: I’m a writer and a teacher, a mother and a wife, a sister and a daughter. I have a ton of friends with babies and we now spend a lot of time talking about our babies. I love them and I love that they are willing to talk to me about my baby.

About my son: He was born in the spring and he is perfect. A perfect ball of idiosyncracy. If he could talk, he might say, in no particular order, on any given day: I’m happy! Now I’m mad. I’m screeching with joy! No wait, that was too loud, now I’m crying. My mommy is the one and only! Put me down, bitch. Don’t you know I can crawl?

I would like, over time, to address the first few months of this motherhood gig. For now, suffice it to say that if there are mothers out there with new new new new little people who feel lonely, sad, unlovely, unloved, exhausted, brittle, overwhelmed, depressed, exhilirated, deflated, joyful, pained, worried, unable, unwilling, capable, fulfilled or any or all of the above at the same time…

I hear you, sister. It’s quite the gig, isn’t it?