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?

I’ve been feeling that special pregnant woman blend of “can’t quite breathe, can’t quite digest, can’t quite get comfortable.” The baby is moving around in a way that feels gross. Companionable, but gross. At this stage, I can tell the baby has BONES. When he pushes out from behind my ribs, it occurs to me once again how weird it is to reproduce like this. NO ONE should have access to behind my ribs.

The OB told me at my last visit that I need to stop going around blabbing to everyone that everything goes a lot faster after 30 weeks, because he says that point of view is “…unusual.” He says for most women, the last 10 weeks are the slowest. Oh. I’m trying to figure out how many first- and second-trimester women I’ve confidently reassured that things pick up speed later. Two million? Three? It is possible that many of them are greatly pissed with me. I didn’t mean to! I thought it was true! I find those earlier weeks so tedious and slow, but at 33 weeks I feel like things are going at a good clip, and the end is in beautiful, beautiful sight.

Which is good, because other things look a little grim. I tried to get the cloth cover off Elizabeth’s car seat so I could, you know, wash the barf off it, and I finally had to resort to reading the instruction manual. I’ll skip over the next part, which is where I go through every page saying, “Where! is! the goddam! part! about! removing the goddam cover!!!” and then spend five minutes complaining in a shrill, angry, panicking voice to Paul that every single page says, basically, “WARNING!! YOU ARE GOING TO USE THIS CAR SEAT INCORRECTLY NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO, AND SOMETHING TERRIBLE WILL HAPPEN AND IT WILL BE COMPLETELY YOUR FAULT!!”

The first instruction for taking off the pad is to remove the eight Phillips-head screws from the back panel. That’s just wrong. WRONG. We chose this car seat because it’s the top-rated Consumer Reports convertible seat, but I think Consumer Reports needs to add a ratings column for ease of laundering. I’m all for safety, and I would choose the same seat again for safety reasons, but holy freaking crap, I couldn’t even get the screws unscrewed, and maybe that was for the best since there were about twenty instructions after that, including more warnings about how I would certainly put the seat back together wrong and it would cause SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH!! I resisted kicking the car seat, but I did “bump into it” on my way past so it would tip over. I tackled it with upholstery cleaner and a washcloth, and then I put it outside to dry and air out. But I am not what you’d call happy about it.

Edited for this correction: Tessie asked what car seat it was, and in looking up the details I see that we do not in fact have the top-rated seat as I’d remembered, though we have one of the top three. The seat we have is the Evenflo Triumph 5, and the top-rated seat is the Evenflo Titan 5, which, as an added bonus, is an estimated $40 cheaper than the Triumph (at the time of the May 2005 rating). But: the twins outgrew the weight limits on their infant seats before they were old enough to be front-facing, and the weight limit for rear-facing was higher for the Triumph 5 than for the Titan 5. (This might not be the case any longer–it was well over a year ago that we bought these, and all I can find now is “deluxe” versions of the Titan 5.)

Elizabeth threw up in the car again today, 5 minutes from our 35-minute-away destination, just like before. I have concluded, based on the number of times this has happened (six or seven, but it feels like ten million) that it is carsickness. I am a genius medical scientist; please award me my honorary degree. It took me awhile to figure it out because although I get carsick and so does Rob, I’ve never actually barfed from it, nor have I ever had a child who barfed from it. Well, until now, when clearly I do have such a child.

Luckily, this time I was prepared. After the fourth trip baptized in barf, I put a “Barf Kit” in the car: paper towels, complete change of clothing, bottle of Febreze, bottle of soapy water, empty plastic bags. So although I had to pull over on the highway to clean up the worst of it with paper towels and baby wipes, afterwards I drove on to the mall, knowing I could clean her up completely when we got there. With the Barf Kit, the trusty Barf Kit, thank goodness I have the Barf Kit. …Where the hell is the Barf Kit? Oh, yes: hanging on the doorknob at home, where I put it after the last time I had to replenish the supplies. Please award me another honorary degree for genius.

It’s true that I can collapse under this sort of overwhelming obstacle, giving in to the landslide of despair and self-pity, weeping with frustration as I drive all the way back home to spend my morning removing the residue and smell of barf from various surfaces and feeling so very sorry for myself. But when it is raining and I nevertheless obtained a good parking space in the covered parking, and when I have driven 35 minutes to get there, and when The Children’s Place is having a good clearance sale I want to re-peruse–well, then I may find an inner steel that can carry me through the next two hours of wandering through the mall in a nearly visible cloud of barf smell.

So! Anyone know how to make a carsick child NOT barf? Because that would be even better than remembering to bring the Barf Kit.

Go say congratulations to Devan over at All D’s: she’s produced the world’s cutest baby boy for the second time in a row, and he is wearing a little froggy outfit that will make you FREAK OUT and go to OldNavy.com and try to order it immediately and FREAK OUT again when it is no longer available.

I am freaking out over baby clothes to keep me from freaking out over the $3000 worth of dental work Paul needs. THREE. THOUSAND. DOLLARS. Of dental work. Could there be a more boring way to spend money? There goes the ENTIRE tax refund, part of which we’d planned to spend on a new couch. Ours is broken so that it is more like a hammock–if the hammock fell down, pulling the anchoring trees with it, and you sat on the resulting heap. We’d also planned to do something about our windows, which are from the 1960s and many don’t even have storms on them, and some of them whistle you a haunting melody when the wind blows, and all of them ensure that we will never die of carbon monoxide poisoning. While window upgrades are not “fun” per se, they are more exciting than dental work.

And speaking of freaking out, because apparently I still am, Paul’s company is changing health insurance plans. Right now. When I am six and a half weeks away from giving birth. And they regret to say they have no information about maternity benefits, nor about covered OBs, nor about cards or new ID numbers, “at this time.” The last time they switched providers, it took two months for us to get our new information. And perhaps you have had this experience and know how happy health care providers are to take your word for it that you have insurance but that you just don’t have any cards or numbers.

This reminds me of a funny story, not funny-ha-ha, more like funny-burst-a-blood-vessel. Eight days before I delivered my firstborn, Paul’s company changed insurers. To an insurer who would not cover my OB. And who charged a $1000 copay (the old company charged $50) for hospital visits, one copay for me and one for the new baby. Nice, yes? It’s been more than 8 years and I am STILL freaking out about that one.

Brownies tonight, I think. Lots and lots of brownies.

Oh, I have been having so much fun buying clothes for Elizabeth! She has only older brothers, and so we have to start from scratch on her wardrobe. I do love handmedowns: the way a shirt can be used for one, two, three, FOUR boys, the original expense of it divided smaller and smaller as each boy grows into it. But I also love to shop for baby clothes, and I love new things.

This is why I need to whisper very quietly that I was a little disappointed when an extremely nice and generous woman I know gave us three enormous plastic bins of baby girl clothes when I was pregnant with the twins—clothes all the way up to size 18 months. Disappointed? Even a little? Oh, how ungrateful! Oh, how very ungrateful of me! And I WAS also happy, and I DID thank her earnestly and sincerely and I truly meant it. But my secret inner heart had wanted the excuse to shop for baby girl things. My secret inner heart had been pretending to be so very burdened by the necessity of going out and buying EVERYTHING PINK IN EVERY STORE WITHIN 100 MILES OF OUR HOUSE. So although my practical, frugal self was delighted with these piles and piles of free, gorgeous baby clothes, my secret inner heart was kicking pebbles sulkily and getting in trouble for having a bad attitude.

I have tried to be patient over the years. I have said that I don’t care if I have boys or girls, and I stand by that claim—but I have never said that I don’t care if I shop for boy clothes or girl clothes. I have managed to find cuteness in boy clothes: the jeans, the little t-shirts, the overalls, the sneakers—but I have not found anything like the joy of buying Elizabeth’s first over-the-top frilly dress, satiny pink with puffed sleeves and layers and layers of skirt, the top layer threaded through with pink satiny ribbons and little pink fabric roses, and a matching pink satin headband with a pink fabric rose on it. In size newborn.

Notice I said we had girl handmedowns up to size 18 months. Notice that Elizabeth is now about 22 months old. For this coming spring and summer, do you know what we have for her to wear? NOTHING. Well, we DID have nothing. Remember my online shopping trip the other day? When I was supposed to be shopping for poor Rob? Four crochet-trimmed bodysuits. A flowered skirt. A skirt with a wide band of lace. Two cardigans. A pair of tights.

And do you know where I went yesterday? To The Children’s Place store in our mall. They had a bunch of the stuff that the online store had been out of stock of. Which is my excuse for an embroidered zip-up hoodie. Three pairs of pedal pushers. Two shirts with cutie round collars and little puffed sleeves.

Everything coordinates. You can put this shirt with those pedal pushers and that hoodie, or you can put it with that skirt and this cardigan. It is a wonder to behold. Boys and girls are both wonderful. But girl CLOTHES are better.

Jonniker has me thinking about UTIs (thanks, Jonniker!), and that reminds me of a question. One of my friends said she heard that if you take a vitamin C tablet after every time you have sex, it can help prevent urinary tract infections. Something about the vitamin C being acidic in the bladder and urinary tract, and the acidity killing off bacteria or whatever awful demons cause a UTI. Is this the kind of crazy thing that people say but it doesn’t actually work, or is it the kind of crazy thing that saves a girl from wanting to amputate her entire lower half a couple times a year?

This is not my first marriage. I was married once before. It was a long time ago, when I was still in school. It lasted less than a year. We didn’t have any children, a fact that makes me wish I were religious so I’d have a deity to thank every day for the rest of my life.

It ended badly. It’s likely he believes to this day that I left him in order to be with someone else. What actually happened is that I left him in order to get the hell away from him. I can understand why he would prefer his theory.

The greatest relief I have ever felt in my life was when I got out of that marriage. I have never wondered if I did the right thing. I have never regretted it. It was one of the best decisions of my entire life.

We haven’t been in touch since we separated. About once a year, I feel curious about what’s going on with him. I wish we had mutual friends who could fill me in; instead, I have Google. I rarely find anything informative. A big shock was the year a minor celebrity with his same name died, and so when I searched I got pages of obituaries and memorials.

Last night I searched. I found a blog. It’s his wife’s.

The blog is for their work, so personal details are scarce. Still, there are some. There are also some photos. I looked through every single post. I learned that he is living with his wife in the country he’d wanted us to live in, and that they are doing the work he’d wanted us to do. They have a son, and they’ve given him the name that he and I had agreed on. This reminds me of a book I read where a woman’s groom ditched her a couple of months before the wedding; she kept her dress and all her church/catering reservations, and just found a new groom.

The peek I got into the life he had in mind for us made me so grateful for my own life, I don’t even know how to adequately express it. My mouth is dry and my jaw is tingling with nausea, and I have the feeling you have when you wake up from a terrible dream and you just want to pet everything in your house because it’s there after all. Paul may drive me nuts with his inconsiderate thoughtlessness (this morning he read in the shower even though he knows that means there won’t be enough hot water for my shower) and his periodic idiocy (how many times is he going to stuff food down the drain?), but at least we have the same rough idea about how we want to live our lives, and about what we want to be doing in the future. We have roughly the same principles and ideals, roughly the same ideas of what’s right and what’s wrong, roughly the same goals for our children’s upbringing. The thought of being bound to someone whose principles and ideas were in fact repellent to me makes me feel like I can’t get enough air.

One reason I don’t often mention my divorce is that people think divorce is such a terrible, sad thing. They’re thinking of their own marriages, and how awful it would feel to have those marriages end. That’s not the right way to think of it. If you’re a liberal agnostic Democrat, imagine being married to a missionary for the Religious Right. If you’re a conservative Christian, imagine being married to a gay Wiccan abortion doctor. Now imagine getting out of it. The marriage was a terrible, sad thing; the divorce was wonderful. I am reminded of this when I see what could have been my future.