When I posted the other day about girl clothes, and about how much fun I was having buying all these cutie little mix-and-match things from the spring clearance sale at The Children’s Place, there were requests for photos. Another post about baby clothes? You don’t have to ask me twice.

First, a photo of most of the haul. I’ve put an x over a skirt I returned. Do you know what that skirt was made of? Linen. I ask you. LINEN. Across what is roughly the top row of the haul, you can see a pink striped polo shirt (I later also bought it in blue), a white crochet-trim bodysuit, a pink floral hoodie, a blue embroidered hoodie, a round-collared white shirt, and a round-collared blue shirt (I later also bought it in pink). Across what is roughly the bottom row you can see a pink floral skirt, yellow pedal pushers, pink pedal pushers (I later also bought them in denim), a blue crochet-trimmed body suit and blue floral skirt, blue tights, a pink-and-white striped cardigan, and the returned linen skirt. If you look carefully you can also see in the lower right hand edge two little baby hands about to start yanking things off the bed. And if you are very sharp-eyed indeed, you will notice that my white-shirted tum makes a guest appearance along the bottom edge.

Clearly we need a runway model to show a few sample outfits. Here is Elizabeth wearing the striped polo in blue. She is wearing jeans because it was too cool that day for pedal pushers, but you get the idea of what the shirt would look like with the denim pedal pushers or with denim shorts:

Here is Elizabeth wearing the round-collared shirt in dark pink, with the pink floral skirt:

Here she is in the pink-and-white cardigan:

And finally, in the blue floral skirt and the blue embroidered hoodie:

I’m so pleased with all the purchases. Everything seems made for a toddler who wants to PLAY. The floral skirts have built-in shorts underneath, and the whole skirt/shorts unit is made of a stretchy material. The shirts, too, have some stretch to them, so they don’t bind her when she tries to move around. The hooded sweatshirts have nice big zippers and the polos have nice big buttons, so I’m not messing around with eensy little things. The round-collared shirts have flower-shaped buttons, which I think is a nice touch.

And everything was $2.99, $3.99, or $4.99, plus I had a 15% off coupon. Nice. I’m kind of thinking I might buy some of my favorite things in bigger sizes for next year, but I’m not sure if I’ll enjoy repeats or not.

I want to draw your attention to Linda’s post about bone marrow donation. I’m already on the registry, but realized after reading her post that I hadn’t updated my address information with them for years.

I’m planning to be an organ donor later on, but what I like about bone marrow donation is that you don’t have to be dead to do it. It’s not even like donating a kidney, where you have a spare but might feel nervous about losing it, in case you need it later. Your body will make more bone marrow, and meanwhile you can save somebody’s life with something you can easily manufacture more of.

It’s a great idea, and a great way to do a lot of helping without having to donate, say, tons of time or bushels of money. And it isn’t as if they’ll be calling you ever other week for more marrow: as I understand it, matches with non-family-members are rare. You register just in case you could be a one in a million for somebody else. Follow the links in Linda’s post for more information, or go directly to The National Marrow Donor Program.

One thing I’m afraid may talk some of you out of it is that there’s a fairly substantial fee to get on the registry: the site says it varies from $52 to $96, and that’s a nice chunk of change for a lot of us. [Edited 2014: it now says $100.] They mean it, though, when they say that depending on where and when you join, some or all of your costs may be covered. When I joined, there was a local boy who needed a transplant, and his church and community raised multiple tens of thousands of dollars to cover the cost of anyone who wanted to join the registry, so my joining was totally free. I believe they also have certain limited funds to cover the costs of people who want to join but can’t afford it, or can only afford part of it. [Edited 2014: I don’t see anything about that on the site anymore.] I hope you won’t let it be a hurdle, because my guess is that there are ways around it and that it would be worth contacting them to ask them to direct you to those ways.

Bleah. Yesterday I had a tickle in my throat, and today I’m sick. I kept waking up all night, feeling hot and sweaty and sore, and then trying to cough out my ribs. If there were any fairness in the world, pregnant women would be immune to illness. Don’t we have enough physical misery as it is?

This illness has come at a bad time, since it was only a day or two ago that I thought, “Okay, NOW I’m getting uncomfortable.” Turning over in bed takes planning. Getting out of bed is tricky. It’s harder to breathe. If I drop something on the floor, and there are no children around to pick it up for me, I can nearly weep. Putting on my socks and shoes takes mental preparation and strength of character. My legs feel like they’re going to pop right out of their ill-fitting sockets. And now I’m sick, too. That is your cue to say something sympathetic—perhaps involving the imminence of your arrival with cookies?

I have tried to explain to the two resident toddlers that they need to take it easy on me today. Just as newborns need a “wait 5 minutes” button, toddlers need a “give me a break today” button. Instead, they have been particularly trying, and it is only 8:30 in the morning. At breakfast, they’d hold out their bowls to me, making fussy “take this away from me” noises; I would take the bowl and they would scream; I would give it back and they would go back to the “eh! eh! ehhhhhhh!!” and then throw the bowl overboard in frustration so that cheerios scattered in a wide arc across the kitchen floor. I had planned to give them some freedom time after breakfast, but instead I put them in their playpen and switched on Blue’s Clues and ran away into the computer room.

The happy thing is that today I am 34 weeks. When I was pregnant with the twins and worried about premature delivery, the OB said that 34 weeks was a “magic week” for babies–that starting at 34 weeks, the chances of serious problems were getting so low, a “happy outcome” was very likely indeed. So hitting 34 weeks is another of those pregnancy milestones I look forward to.

Even if it weren’t a milestone week, EVERY week is a milestone week at this point. It’s 34 weeks! That means there are only 5 weeks left! Holy crap, 5 weeks! That’s 35 days! A month and 5 days! …Okay, that’s starting to sound long again. It’s 5 WEEKS! It would not be too early to address baby announcement envelopes! It would not be too early to launder eensy little blue outfits, and little side-snap shirts, and teeny hats, and pack them all carefully into bureau drawers alongside the tiniest diapers ever! Maybe I will work on one of those tasks this morning. (*sound of toddlers fighting*) Or maybe I will hide out in here all day.

Commenter Marcie has brought it to my attention that Evenflo does not post on their web site the instructions for removing the goddamn cover of the Triumph 5 (or Triumph V, if you are ancient Roman) toddler car seat. My recent experience has shown me that it is NOT WORTH IT, that you might as well throw the whole car seat away and purchase a new one, preferably made by a company that has realized that children are messy and barfy and gross. But if you MUST remove it, you will need the instructions, and I have it within my power to provide those. I consider it my public duty to do so; thus, this public service announcement.

First of all, I will help you find your lost instruction manual, if there is any hope of doing so. You will be tearing the house apart looking for it, thinking to yourself, “But I ALWAYS save these things! ALWAYS! Am I LOSING MY MIND??” No! It is Evenflo! They have lost THEIR minds, and you merely turned yours over to them for safekeeping! When you received the car seat, the owner’s manual warned you that your child would face SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH if you didn’t put the owner’s manual where Evenflo told you to, and so you obeyed, and now you can’t find it because it is in a place you would never think to look. Go out to your car, assuming that’s where you keep your car seat. Look at the car seat, and you will see in the center of the cover a label that warns you about things–probably something about proper installation. At the bottom of that label is an almost unnoticeable remark about the instruction manual being located behind the something-something. “Something-something” will not be anything that makes sense. Don’t worry! Just listen to the sound of my voice and I will guide you through. That warning is printed on a FLAP of cover. LIFT the flap. The flap has a POCKET on the back of it. The owner’s manual is IN THE POCKET. Intuitive, right? That’s EXACTLY where you’d look for the manual, isn’t it?

So maybe now you have your manual in your hand, and you can find the seat pad removal instructions all the way at the end of it. In that case, we can now part as friends, and good luck to you on your life’s journey. Otherwise, if you are empty-handed and sad because your car seat flap pocket was empty, fear not! Here are the instructions, with my clarifying comments in brackets.

 
Removing the Seat Pad of the Evenflo Triumph Safety Seat

1. Give up. It’s too hard, and not worth it.

2. Okay, fine. Have it your way.

3. Unfasten all eight (four on each side) seat hooks. [These are the little plastic hooks that keep the cloth cover stretched onto the car seat frame. And thanks, Evenflo, for noting that I will need to remove the seat pad for cleaning! I thought YOU were the ones who hadn’t realized that!]

4. Remove the eight screws on the back of the seat back cover with a Phillips head screwdriver. Be sure to save the screws for when you reinstall the cover. [This is where I actually DID give up. I couldn’t get even the first screw out, it was so tightly in there. And there were EIGHT. And I was already nearly in tears from not being able to find the manual, and now discovering that it was going to be SO HARD to remove the cover. Also: DUH about keeping the screws. Oh, I was going to throw them away!]

5. Remove two plastic retainer clips [these are on the lower back of the car seat after you remove the panel; they look like big flat sideways plastic staples], then push both harness clips [I can’t tell what the hell those are, it just shows a picture of someone pulling something out of the place where the retainer clip was] through the opening in the seat height adjuster [oh my god, are you losing your mind with confusion? just throw the stupid seat away!] to the front side of the seat.

6. Pull the harness clips [between the cover and the car seat frame] through the harness adjuster cover [the slots where you can choose a height for the straps], headfoam [the foamy padding between the cover and the frame] and seat pad [the cover].

7. Remove the seat pad from the seat shell. [Holy crap, is it actually OFF? Does this WORK? Write to me and tell me.]

To Reinstall Cover:

1. Follow instructions in reverse.

2. Give up in tears.

3. Kick car seat down driveway, screaming at it.

4. Dismember car seat corpse in dead of night; stuff furtively into opaque trash bags.

5. Go out and buy new car seat.

Just as you should not grocery shop when you are hungry, there are certain times it is a bad idea to think about what kind of impact a new baby might have on your family. If it is, for example, dinnertime, and you are worn out and regretting your raised voice with the older children earlier, and you are at the grocery store even though you’re too tired for this because you are out of the very elements of life itself (milk, bread, bananas), and you are with a toddler who is mangling a loaf of bread and yelling because you won’t let her do the same to the irritatingly expensive grapes, and you forgot the bread and had to go back several aisles for it, and your lower back feels sore and you’re aware that you’re waddling, and your pants are hitching down and your shirt is hitching up even though you’ve yanked them up/down respectively twenty times in this aisle alone, and when you get home you are already ten minutes late to give the twins their dinner and yet you still have to put away all the groceries, and your possibly worthless husband is playing videogames with the two older kids as you stagger your pregnant self up and down the stairs with heavy bags contemplating whether having to ask him for help would also mean you’d have to hurt him badly, and when the groceries are put away it is now twenty-five minutes late to feed the twins, and they complain about everything you offer them, and when you brush their teeth one of the twins bites you and the other twin swats the toothbrush so that your glasses are covered with speckles of toothpaste, and as you haul each twin to bed you can barely carry their heavy squirming bodies and there are still more than five weeks of getting bigger and more sore than this—THIS is not a good time to consider what life will be like when the new baby arrives.

Perhaps it was putting the cart before the horse to discuss baby spacing before we discussed whether to have more babies at all. Certainly this is what Paul says whenever I bring up the topic of spacing.

Paul and I have, as I briefly mentioned in the Baby Spacing post, a “take it one baby at a time” philosophy: that is, we didn’t decide ahead of time how many babies to have, we just considered after each one whether or not to have another. Looking back at our results, it is a comical philosophy. First, that we would call it “one baby at a time” and then have twins; and second, that this last baby was a complete surprise following a decision to stop having babies. Go, us!

After Rob was born, we did in fact discuss stopping right there. I nodded, and I mentioned many reasons why stopping with one was a good idea, and I agreed with all Paul’s reasons why stopping with one was a good idea, but I never seriously considered it. There are many advantages to stopping with one, it’s true. And it would have taken a forcible hysterectomy before I would have done so.

I think it is both lucky and unlucky to have a drive to keep having more babies. On one hand, it takes a lot of the worry out of it: I may or may not have freaked out repeatedly during this pregnancy about a FIFTH CHILD HOLY CRAP, but my natural inclination is to have more-more-more-’til-they-take-my-uterus-away, so for the most part I’ve been thrilled, and I’ve been thrilled about every pregnancy. And I haven’t spent much time agonizing about whether we should have more children or not–so far I’m always on the side of yes. Which is good! And makes my life simpler!

But on the other hand, when is this going to stop? Will I have more children than I can handle, more children than is right for our family, just because of this presumably hormonal drive to keep having one (or two) after another? Am I going to be eighty years old and still pining for more babies? It is beginning to look that way.

It’s more common, and probably better, to do a little more agonizing. Should there be another? If so, how old would we be when the nest was finally empty? Do we want to struggle to afford another daycare cost, a bigger car, all those braces and glasses, another break in my career? Do we want to split our attention like this? Has it been too long since the youngest was born? Am I getting too old for this? Do we really want to start all over again with night feedings and potty training? Don’t we want to do something with our twenties/thirties/forties other than rear children?

Or so I’ve heard. As I said, I don’t do a whole lot of this kind of agonizing, except late at night when I ought to be sleeping. Except for periodic freak-outs, I mostly think that everything will work out, that things like expenses and potty training seem bigger when viewed from a distance, that probably in the long-term view of things it doesn’t really matter if we have one more or two more or three more, that in any event I want more children and will be sorry if I don’t get them, and that I, personally, am more likely to regret not having children than to regret having them. This is not true for everyone.

Let’s see, where were we? Oh, yes! I was saying that after Rob was born, I faked like I was willing to consider having only one child, and used the time Paul was talking about it to think about when we should stop using birth control and what we should name the second baby. And, as I wrote in the Baby Spacing post, we had William 2 years and 2 months after Rob.

When I was pregnant with William, I made lists of pros and cons for having a boy or having a girl. One thing on my list of boy pros was that it was more likely that Paul would lean toward having a third child. Another thing on my list of boy pros was that we’d face less criticism if we did have a third: people seem more understanding if you have two boys and they assume you’re “trying for a girl” than if you have a boy and a girl and you’re “pushing your luck” / “contributing to the population problem.”

As I expected, Paul was willing to have a third. Since the 2 year 2 month spacing worked for us before, our goal was to space the next one in that same range. Then Paul’s employer went out of business and Paul couldn’t find a new job, and I got a job. Periodically we would think about getting pregnant on schedule anyway, but that seemed like a bad idea even to me. I was upset, though, at the delay, and increasingly tense about it. When Paul found a new job, we had to wait three months for his health insurance to start, and then it took three more months before I was pregnant.

I conceived right around the time we would have been conceiving our fourth baby, if we’d kept to the same spacing schedule. When we found out we were having twins, it seemed funny–like it was that fourth baby plus the third baby we’d had to delay. As if the babies were backed up in the pipes because we’d had to wait.

When I was pregnant with the twins, it became apparent to me from a series of discussions on the topic that all along Paul had been thinking we could “take it one baby at a time” up to a maximum of four babies. This was not a limit I had understood. I spent that pregnancy half-elated to be having twins, half-upset that this meant everything was my “last” so much sooner than expected: last pregnancy test, last positive pregnancy test daze, last baby-naming, last delivery, last newborn, last nursing, last tiny baby clothes, last all of it. And since it was twins, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be doing much quiet, melancholy, live-in-the-moment basking, either. I was sadder than I’d have expected, and I also felt like I shouldn’t go around being sad. When you have four children, you don’t get much sympathy if you go around whining about how you’ll never get to have any more.

Plus, in many ways I agreed with Paul. Four seemed like a good place to stop. Four is a nice-sounding number. You can have four children without people thinking you belong to a weirdo cult. Four car seats fit comfortably in a standard minivan. Two older and two younger is a nice arrangement. There were many reasons why four was the right place to stop. One reason it wasn’t: I didn’t want to. But as I’ve mentioned, I may never want to stop. It seemed that I would need to resign myself to that.

After I weaned the twins, I got a prescription for the Pill. We’ve used other, less reliable methods in the past, because it didn’t really matter if there was a whoops, but now I wanted something that wouldn’t let me have that flicker of hope every month. I didn’t want to go as far as a permanent procedure for either of us, but I was willing to take the Pill. I was supposed to take it on the first Sunday following the first day of my next period. I put it in my sock drawer and waited for my period. Which was due any day. Any day now. ANY. DAY. NOW. …Where the hell is it? And here we are. I still have an unused pack of pills in my sock drawer.

A couple of you have asked if this is it, if this is my last pregnancy. As I replied in the comments section, the pregnancy before this one was my last pregnancy. So it’s difficult to say for sure. Paul has threatened to get The Snip, but he doesn’t even make his own dentist appointments: if I don’t set it up, I don’t think he’ll do it.

Personally, I’d like to go for an even half-dozen. We’re already in it for five, might as well have six. Paul says really, truly, this is it, we are done–but he loves babies, and he may find that when we’re not quite so inundated by them he starts to feel a hankering for a fresh one. Stay tuned, that’s all I can say.

In the meantime, tell us all how you’ve been making decisions about whether to have more children, or when to stop. I’m hoping we can do this without making each other feel icky. There are tons of really good, positive reasons for having zero kids, one kid, two kids, however many kids, and Mr. Rogers and I think we can say those reasons in ways that don’t make other people feel icky for having different reasons or making different choices, or having different circumstances that allow for different reasons and different choices. (Or selling anything bought or processed, or buying anything sold or processed, or repairing anything sold, bought, or processed.) (You didn’t catch the reference?)

Also, can we have an understanding that it is okay to stop having children because you don’t WANT any more? I think people feel like they’re not supposed to say that, but I think it’s a totally legitimate reason, don’t you? It’s sensible.

As before, write as much as you want in the comments section (it’s bottomless, I believe), or if you’d prefer, write your own blog post about it and put a link in the comments section. Readyyyyyyyy….GO!

There were some mixed reactions in the comments section to some Dr. Martens sandals I ordered and then cancelled when I realized they were in fact men’s sandals. Some people agreed with me that they were girly, and also that they were pretty. Other people agreed that they were girly, but thought they were kind of ugly. Other people thought they looked like men’s sandals. Other people were unpleasantly reminded of girly ex-boyfriends. Here’s a photo of the sandals to refresh your memory:

I went back and forth. Would the Dr. Martens people think I was crazy if I ordered the sandals a second time after making that pitiful plea that they cancel my order? Did I even want the sandals anymore after LoriD‘s comment about the sandals being “Girly in an ‘I’m going on a hike to eat granola with a baby on my back’ kind of way”? LoriD, you wound me with the sword of truth. As soon as you said it, I realized it was true.

So now I am considering a different pair. I usually avoid backless sandals, because I don’t like to have to clench my toes to keep sandals on, nor do I like the way they sproing up to slap the soles of my feet with every step. But my cousin has this pair and she assures me that there is no toe-clenching or sole-slapping with these. It seems to me that slip-on sandals would be perfect for right now, when I no longer bend at the waist.

Of course I would treasure your input. Are these better than the girly-man ones? Or are they just as hike-and-granola (*wince*)?

Tessie and I want to talk about spacing babies, and the rest of you are welcome to join us. I feel obligated to warn you that this is one of my favorite topics in the whole world. I will try to edit this post so that it is not the length and breadth of eternity, but I can’t really promise anything.

I will go first, by reviewing the spacing of my own children and how that’s worked out. Settle in: there are a lot of them.

Robert was born first. Our plan was to take things one baby at a time and not plan ahead of time to have a certain number, but to see how things went. I’m not sure how many minutes after Rob’s birth it was when I started planning the second baby. Perhaps it was while I was still pregnant.

Paul and I spent Rob’s babyhood discussing what would be the right spacing between the first and second children. Through questioning and observing, we decided that there was no clearly “right” spacing: too much depends on unknowns such as the personality types of the children. Some siblings love being close in age and some hate it; some siblings love a bigger gap and some feel like they grew up as strangers. We had to choose something, though, and what we decided on was something in the 2-1/2 to 3 year range. That seemed close enough for companionship, far enough to let us breathe a little between children–and far enough to have the first one be a little more house-trained and independent before the second one came along.

I, like so many women before and after me, thought it would be a good idea to have a running start. It was as if I thought that by allowing extra months to conceive, I would use up all my “no luck” months and then get to conceive the first month I actually wanted to. Was I trying to pull one over on Fate or something? Fate thought that was pretty funny. I stopped using birth control four months before the 2-1/2 year spacing time, and got pregnant right away. So our first two children are 2 years 2 months apart.

That spacing has advantages and disadvantages, as do all spacings. It’s close enough that Rob doesn’t remember a time before William was born, and he doesn’t remember William’s arrival. Rob was also young enough (and was of the personality) that he didn’t seem jealous or sad about the new baby. If he’d been older, perhaps he would have better understood the significance of a new sibling, but as it was, we might as well have acquired a new noisy kitchen appliance. He ignored William. We didn’t see any trauma, and we were looking hard.

For the first few years, even a 2-year spacing is too far apart for the kids to have much in common unless the older one is nurturing and wants to do baby things with the baby. A 1-year-old is doing entirely different things than a 3-year-old. Even at ages 6 and 8, Rob is clearly significantly older than William. They can play together, but they’re a kindergartner and a second grader.

Our plan was to have a third baby with approximately the same spacing, since the 2 years and 2 months worked well for us. Then Paul’s employer went out of business, he was out of work for a year and a half, and I got a paying job. People say things like “There’s never a ‘perfect time’ to have a baby”–but there sure are times that can be avoided, and this was one of them. When he found a new job, we waited 90 days for his health insurance to take effect, and then it took three months for me to get pregnant. The twins were born when Rob was 6 and William was 4.

That gives us two more spacings to look at: the 6-year and the 4-year. Rob had not been happy about us having another baby, probably because he considers William a pain in the butt. Two babies was even worse. Until they were born. He loves the twins. They bug him and follow him around and hit him enthusiastically in the face, and he loves them. When he gets home from school he goes to find the twins and play with them and let them flop on him. He talks to them in the higher-pitched voice adults use with small children.

William considers himself allied with Rob as one of the “older kids.” He likes the twins, too, but I think it’s mostly because Rob does and William followed his example. If William had been the oldest, and then a four-year gap before the next baby, I think William would have been jealous and would have felt left out. Four years old is old enough to resent a new baby and to partially understand the impact on the family and the loss of attention. And William is, personality-wise, less independent and more lovey than Rob, which I think makes for a more difficult acceptance of younger children. Even at age 2, Rob seemed to enjoy the “big kid” status that younger siblings give older siblings.

Now we’re having another. This new baby will be born when Rob is 8, William is 6, and the twins are a couple of weeks away from turning 2. Rob has been excited all along, and my guess is that he’ll be even fonder of this baby than he was of the twins, since this time he knows he likes babies. I’ll be interested to see if William at age 6 will be similar to Rob at age 6, and if he’ll be more naturally inclined to like this baby even without Rob’s example.

If the twins are anything like Rob was at age 2, they’ll be a cross between oblivious and annoyed: not understanding that the new baby is a person, and irritable that they can’t be on my lap because the new baby is there–but not with any deeper knowledge of the new baby as interloper, just the same annoyance they’d feel if I had a box on my lap, or a book taking my attention.

But as I said, these things are so affected by the particular child. My brother and I were 2 years apart and we played together all the time, whereas Rob and William are the same spacing but don’t get along well. Rob definitely likes babies better the older he is, but maybe William would have been happier with a baby born shortly after he was. The twins might incorporate this new baby as an honorary triplet, or they might close ranks against him–or maybe Edward will bond to the new baby and Elizabeth will separate even more from Edward.

I would be interested to hear your experiences with baby spacing: what you grew up with, what you’ve done with your own children and/or what you plan to do, what you’ve heard is good/bad, what you’ve always thought would be nice. Go ahead and write a book in the comment section, or write your own post and put a link in the comment section. Tessie and I, we want to hear everything you’ve got.

And soon I think we should discuss a different but related topic: deciding whether or not to have another baby, and deciding when to stop.

I have one of those RSS thingies that tells me when a blog has been updated, and I have over seventy blogs on that list. There are a few I read with intense concentration, and there are a lot I skim just to keep up or just in case someone talks about one of my favorite topics (baby names! brownie recipes! planning and spacing of babies! ANYTHING of babies!).

The problem with reading so many blogs is that it can give me something I’ve been thinking of as “blogsickness.” It’s when I’ve been reading blogs and then suddenly I feel fed up with all blogs, with all writing, and with everything that everyone has ever said or thought since the beginning of time. That’s when I know it’s time to go sit in the recliner and read a People magazine, or maybe go to bed.

I think usually it’s when I read too many posts about the same topic, or too many posts about topics I’ve read too many posts about before. I’m not sure, though, because I don’t think there’s strict cause and effect here, or any one specific trigger. I think sometimes it’s that I sit down at my computer in a mood that makes me likely to develop blogsickness. It’s never that I read one specific post (or one specific blog) and get blogsickness.

Do you get this, too? If you do, what do you think causes it?