If only a stick of deodorant did not have to bid its farewell by breaking off startlingly into moist, powdery chunks all over the sink and floor, leaving the empty plastic shell to scrape unpleasantly against the armpit.

Rob said he had a dream about lemon toothpaste. The next time I went to the store, I blew his little mind by bringing home a tube of that very thing. I tried it and thought it was pretty good, like lemon drops. Weird flavor for toothpaste, but not bad. Then Paul said he thought it tasted like Lemon Pledge, and the next time I used it I realized he was absolutely right. It tastes like Lemon Pledge.

Now that we have a large freezer, we are getting better at going grocery shopping once a week rather than twice or even thrice, but the bananas don’t work on this system: they’re eaten up by the second or third day, but if we buy extras they go bad before we can use them, and I only want to make so many banana muffins/fritters.

Tomorrow I have an ultrasound to take a look at the placenta previa situation from the ultrasound I had in mid-January. I am glad to be getting this looked at, because then I can either stop worrying or else I can start worrying in earnest, rather than this silly worry limbo where I’m feeling like I could be worrying over something that would turn out to be nothing, not that that’s an unusual situation for me, considering how often I worry about how I’d cope if Cujo were outside my minivan.

I haven’t been posting separate Digging Ourselves Out entries because my projects have been so very, very dull and unphotoworthy, but that doesn’t seem to be changing so I’ll mention what I did today. We have a recliner too short for the vacuum cleaner to fit under the edges. From the chair in the kitchen where I feed the twins, I can see right directly under that chair, and the accumulation of dirt was bugging me. I moved the recliner and vacuumed under it.

Also, our dustbuster had been making me feel sad and low. We bought it to replace one that I used all the time until it finally broke, but we’d had this new one only a few months when it started seeming as if I might as well turn it on its back and stick the Cheerios one by one into the little slot. I was feeling grouchy about having made an expensive purchase that turned so useless so soon. Then I thought maybe it would help to use a little brush to brush out what looked like little lint-clogged holes. As I was doing that, I thought, Hey, this part looks like it snaps off. Snapping it off revealed practically an entire cat curled around the filter. This dustbuster has a different design than our old one, and evidently there is a filter that is supposed to be cleaned. After I cleaned it, the dustbuster’s strength was so restored it nearly suctioned itself to the floor. So that is happy.

But you see how those tasks are difficult to assign per se. Well, how about this: spend 5 minutes or less doing a small cleaning task that is bugging you every time you see it unclean. And if you have a dustbuster, and it has a filter, clean the filter. There!

Okay, fine. You said go ahead and post the rant, and since I can’t make editing headway with it anyway, I’m going to.

I think it’s time we talked about weight gain during pregnancy, but I want to be careful because there are few topics more danger-laden than weight. Furthermore, I could get a little crabby, because I have a mother-in-law story associated with the subject.

In fact, let’s just get the mother-in-law thing out in the open. That way, if you sense a certain…tension to my tone, you’ll know it’s because I’m thinking of her, and not because I am mad at you. When my mother-in-law was pregnant with Paul, she gained only ten pounds. When she was pregnant with Paul’s sister Beth, she LOST ten pounds, and she was thin to begin with. Beth was born with learning disabilities and birth defects, most of unknown origin (that is, it is not possible to say whether they are genetic or spontaneous).

My mother-in-law continues to brag about losing weight during that pregnancy. I think she’s probably told me the story twenty times over the past ten years. Considering how many women wring themselves ragged with guilt over pregnancy problems and birth defects that had absolutely nothing to do with anything they did or didn’t do, why wouldn’t it at least cross my mother-in-law’s mind to wonder if perhaps she should stop flapping her yap about how proud she is of her weight loss?

So you see, I am not going to do a very good job of being cool and objective on this topic. It does indeed piss me off when I hear women bragging about how little weight they’ve gained. When I found there were online groups devoted to women trying to gain as little weight as possible during pregnancy–and in fact, ideally to use pregnancy as an opportunity to lose weight—I felt like throwing up all over them.

Part of the reason it makes me so sick is that I can see the appeal. I don’t like it that I can, but I can. I have even thought to myself how cool it would be to gain 0 pounds during a pregnancy, and then be automatically 25-35 pounds lower after the pregnancy was over—as if I am dumb enough to think that the amount of weight you’re supposed to gain is a guaranteed loss afterwards, and might as well capitalize on it. I gag when I think it, but I do think it.

Furthermore, I’ve acted on those thoughts. I was upset that during my first pregnancy, I gained over 40 pounds. My OB didn’t say anything about it, but I considered myself overweight to begin with, and all the literature says that overweight women don’t usually gain as much. After the baby was born, I lost the weight without trying. So when I was pregnant with William, I came up with a theory. My theory was that if I didn’t gain any weight with that pregnancy, I’d be down 40 pounds afterwards. I’m feeling gross just typing that out. Gross and dumb.

For the first two trimesters of that pregnancy, I didn’t gain any weight, and in fact I lost some weight. I did it by eating a lot of salads, and I don’t mean the nutritious kinds with lots of vegetables and dark leafy greens, I mean the kind with iceberg lettuce and fat-free dressing. I ate canned vegetable soup, the kind where the vegetables have the nutritional content of the label on the can, but the calories are about the same as eating the label, too. I am glad to be able to say that I also drank a lot of skim milk, and I ate eggs and yogurt, and I ate carrots and cantaloupe and oranges and Grape-Nuts and wheat germ, so I was not as stupid as I could have been. Part of my brain was being stupid, but another part of my brain was trying to keep the baby healthy and safe, and apparently succeeded.

In the last eight weeks or so, I couldn’t do it anymore, and I ate and ate and ate. I gained fourteen pounds over my starting weight during that pregnancy, and it was all in those last eight weeks. I wish I’d eaten sooner, because after the baby was born, do you know how many pounds I lost? Fourteen. Not forty as I’d fantasized. I could have gone right ahead and let my body gain forty the way it so dearly wanted to.

Here is what pisses me off so, so much. My OB praised me during those first two trimesters, and so did his nurse. They praised me and praised me. They told me I was doing so great with my weight. Those stupid idiots. It is right and natural to gain weight during pregnancy. At the minimum, they should have been questioning me about why I wasn’t gaining weight: was I eating well but just didn’t happen to be gaining? or was I eating iceberg lettuce and soup can labels? At one point the nurse noticed that I’d gained 40 pounds with my first pregnancy. Instead of wondering to herself why I was breaking the pattern this time, she said knowingly, “There’s a learning curve!” As if the first time around, I’d thought I could eat the entire earth because I was pregnant, but NOW I knew better, what a smart girl!

My theory–not exactly a ground-breaking one—about pregnancy weight gain is that any one particular woman gains based on a combination of two factors: (1) her own body’s genetic tendencies, and (2) her eating habits during the pregnancy—but mostly number 1. Here are my body’s genetic tendencies: I gain more than the average amount of weight during each pregnancy, and it comes off automatically afterwards; I lose ten additional pounds while breastfeeding, but I don’t get too familiar with that situation because I always get them back when I wean. That’s my pattern. I can change it, but only through extreme measures in my diet, as with my second pregnancy. Other women gain less weight, but then have to work hard to lose it; or they don’t lose their last 10 pounds until they wean; or they gain more weight and never lose it; or they gain much more weight and do lose it—whatever their own patterns are, that’s what happens to them.

When I was pregnant with the twins, I gained 55 pounds. My OB (a different OB) never said anything about my weight gain one way or the other. His nurse commented at every single visit. “Oooh,” she’d say, breathing in through her teeth. “Looks like another four.” I should have said something, something like, “I don’t know if they covered this in your nurse training, but it is normal and healthy to gain weight during pregnancy.” I am not assertive enough to do that. What I did instead, every single time she gave me what she clearly considered to be “the bad news,” is I said, “Oh, GOOD!”—in a really happy tone of voice.

I think it is difficult and feels crappy to gain weight during pregnancy. I think women are pressured all the time not to gain weight, and in fact to lose weight, and I think that kind of pressure is hard to shake off even when we know it should be shaken off. I think it’s even hard for OBs to shake off. I think some of them have started thinking it’s a good thing when a woman doesn’t gain much weight. I think that’s crap.

I think no one should make a pregnant woman feel even slightly bad about gaining weight, because I think we feel bad enough about it already. It’s hard for us to change our bodies like that, and there isn’t much support for it. Some of us have people in our lives who say, “Oh my god, you are getting so big!” or “Look how HUGE you’re getting!” or “Do you really think you should be eating that?” or “Eating for two, huh?” It takes focus and dedication to allow those numbers to go up so steadily and so relentlessly. I think OBs need to shut about about it unless they are talking about how the woman needs to gain MORE. I’ve had more trouble from the nurses, so I’d like to decree that they need to shut up about it completely, unless the OB has specifically asked them to talk to the patient about her weight, which I’m guessing never ever happens. Romantic partners will keep their lips zipped unless they want to lose a vital body part of the pregnant woman’s choice.

There is one more category of people who need to shut up, and I’m afraid that category is made up of a subset of other pregnant women and other women who have been pregnant. Sometimes pregnant women don’t gain much weight because they are stupid and vain and put their own figures ahead of the health of their babies. Sometimes pregnant women don’t gain much weight because that happens to be their own particular pattern: they’re eating healthily and plenty and they’re not being stupid, but they just don’t gain very much weight. Whatever the reason for it, those women are hereby mandated to keep their mouths shut about it, during the pregnancy and in all future conversations about pregnancy-related weight gain. Those of us who gain more, we know how good it must feel to gain less. But that’s not how our bodies work, and you are hurting us and pissing us off when you shrug and lower your eyes and say you can’t believe you’re 30 weeks and have only gained 5 pounds. We can hear the pleasure in your voices. Anyone who pretends to be happy for you is actually picturing the damage she could do to your shrugging shoulders with a well-placed fork.

Furthermore, considering the mental and physical hurdle that must be leapt for a woman to make herself gain the healthy weight she needs to gain, everyone around her should in fact be encouraging her to gain. Romantic partners, I am speaking especially to you. BRING FOOD. Encourage eating. Don’t do That Look when you see her eating something, like you think maybe she shouldn’t eat it. That makes us want to kill you where you stand, and we have the hormonal chops to pull it off so don’t push us.

Anyway. With this pregnancy, I will tell you, I have gained almost 25 pounds so far. I am 26 weeks pregnant, soon to enter the trimester when it is expected that you will gain one pound per week–which is what I’ve already been doing. It looks like I’m headed for another 40-pound gain. And I will TAKE IT.

I’m working on a post, but I’m not getting it right. It’s about pregnancy weight gain, and I keep getting so pissed as I’m writing, I am beginning to think that what I’m actually writing is a rant. Nothing wrong with rants, I LIKE rants, but I was hoping for a different effect, something more…detached. The post is also way, way too long, the kind of length not even a very interested reader would tackle, but I can’t cut out a single word—and in fact, when I try, I end up ADDING words. This is another indicator that what I have on my hands is a rant. I think I’d better back away slowly and come back to it later.

Instead I will write about my new baby name book, which is a disappointment but not the kind of disappointment that provokes a too-long, too-angry post. This is more a situation where the book is pretty good, but not as good as I’d hoped.

The book is The Baby Name Bible by Pamela Redmond Satran and Linda Rosenkrantz, and they get off on the wrong foot with me right away by claiming to have started the WHOLE IDEA of choosing baby names: before they came along with their first baby-name book about 20 years ago, everyone just picked names out of thin air without giving it a moment’s thought.

They go on to bother me by saying that my goal should be to “fall in love with” a baby name. This makes me feel pressured and tense. I’ve only “fallen in love with” one of the four names we’ve used so far, and I still do feel all crushy about it. The other three, I liked well enough, and then they grew on me even more. I’m just trying to find a name I like well enough to use, and when they tell me I have to be in love, I feel overwhelmed and discouraged.

Many of the name entries seem to be there only to plump the total number of names high enough that they can say “50,000+ baby names!” on the cover. The authors seem to think so, too, because the descriptions for these names are things like “Don’t even think about it” and “Only for girls.” Other descriptions seem to go for the easy joke rather than actually giving an opinion of the name.

I’m not sorry I bought the book. For one thing, I like to buy a new baby name book with each pregnancy, as a sort of Happy Pregnancy present. But if I were buying a baby name book for someone else, I would definitely, definitely go with The Baby Name Wizard by Laura Wattenberg instead. It’s my top favorite so far. I love the entries enough to read them straight through one after another, even for names I’m not at all interested in using. I love the sibling name suggestions, which not only give actual good suggestions, they’re also intended to give you an idea of the kind of category other people will put your child’s name into.

Oh, I will give you a sample entry. This is what it says for the name Oliver, which we are not going to use because we have a cat named Oliver, but otherwise I think it’s almost for sure we’d be using it for this baby:
—————
OLIVER
Popularity: #243
Style: Antique Charm, English, Saints, Shakespearean
Nicknames: Ollie
Sisters: Helena, Cecilia, Lucy, Sophie, Violet
Brothers: Julius, Leo, Edgar, Felix, Solomon
Oliver seemed a little eccentric a generation ago, but fashion has come around to its charms. The name’s offbeat style now sounds handsome and rakish. Oliver is already in full fashion flower in the U.K., where they’ve always appreciated unconventional heartthrobs.
—————

There are longer descriptions later in the book of all the style categories, and other examples of names within those categories. There is also a little graph next to each name, showing how its popularity has risen or fallen over the years, and where it peaked. I lurrrrrrrrrrrrrve it. I want to marrrrrrrrrrrrrrry it. It’s no wonder other books fall short.

I am writing a post, and in it I am planning to do a little swearing. However, the last couple of days I have been out exploring the bloggerhood (“Hey! Evidently LOTS of people have blogs!”), and I have come across not one but TWO bloggers saying something like, “I wish I could swear in this blog,” or “If only bloggers could swear,” or things like that. This gives me pause. I wondered if perhaps they knew something I didn’t know.

Do any of you know of any reason NOT to swear in a blog, other than the possibility of offending people who don’t like swearing? I mean, could it be something like that a blog with swears would get blocked by some people’s browsers, something of that sort?

My, was I glad to see the big yellow bus this morning. I waved and waved and jumped around and yelled, “GOOD MORNING!!!,” and the bus driver called back, “I hear ya.” She has kids, too.

Even when it is not the week after a school vacation, I am always grateful for the bus. For one thing, it separates my vinegar firstborn from my baking soda secondborn. For another thing, it puts me outside in the fresh air for a few minutes. Not only does this provide me with an indignant reply if anyone were to ask me, “Didn’t you even leave the house today?,” it also cleanses my olfactory palate so I am able to notice when I come back inside that my house smells like onions and diapers, and won’t someone put a little Febreze Air Effects into the sad stale air?

Speaking of the sad stale air, I think something is wrong with our Vicks warm-mist vaporizer. It percolated away the whole night long, but this morning it was still over half full (normally it would be down to the sizzling scraps), and the room was not very steamy. It did this last night, too. It was a $10 vaporizer and we’ve had it for several years, so it’s no great loss to replace it–but if anyone has any great vaporizer repair stories they’re sitting on, this would be a great time to tell them.

I don’t know why I look forward to weekends; it must be a holdover from my paying-job-and-no-kids days. When Paul is home, the workload is theoretically lighter but it feels heavier.

For example, when I’m the only parent in charge, it doesn’t bother me much to be unshowered and unbreakfasted while I’m feeding and bathing the children. When there are two parents, it bothers me very much, especially if Paul has made his own shower and his own breakfast a priority, or if he’s all crabby because he hasn’t been able to: “I haven’t even taken a shower yet,” he’ll say, ostensibly to the child asking to be played with, but actually to me, to communicate not only his extreme awesomeness but also his extreme suffering. I know it’s a particular bad weekend if I have to stop myself from saying, “Oh, yeah? Well, welcome to my WHOLE GODDAMNED LIFE!” more than, say, ten times in a single day. He is not thinking, as I feel he should be, that I do this every day and that he should be supremely grateful that having a stay-at-home mom for a wife means that all he usually has to do in the morning is worry about his own selfish body. He’s only feeling put-upon, and perhaps wondering why I run such a lousy household that a man can’t relax with his newspaper and his pipe while the children play silently in a spotless nearby room.

By Sunday night, I’m glad that the next day is Monday and we can get back to normal. I can do things my usual way, and I don’t have to get in a big knot about what Paul is or isn’t doing. I can just do my job, and look forward to him coming home that night from his.

One thing I love about having lots of children is seeing the things I buy for them get used again and again. I’ve mentioned (and mentioned, and mentioned) that I enjoy getting things on clearance at Target. Just imagine how much my bargain-hunting soul loves to use those items for several children. Buy a child’s shirt for $1.74, then bring it out for the third boy in a row, knowing a fourth boy is coming to wear it next, and right there’s a little slice of happiness.

I do buy some things new for each new child. Sometimes it’s necessary: my first two boys were born in the winter, and my next two are summer babies, so some of the seasonal stuff is the wrong size: the child needs size 12m shorts, and all we have is 12m sweaters. Sometimes it’s a matter of things starting to look dated: the things I bought for my first son eight years ago in the late ’90s don’t look as cute now. Sometimes things wear out: jeans get holes in the knees, onesies get stretched out and thin and grungy. And sometimes it’s just fun: fun to have new things, fun to buy things for the new baby.

I like to shop. I’m saying it right out, because I think people who like to shop are supposed to be embarrassed, like we’re Paris Hilton or something. I guess it’s supposed to be superficial to enjoy seeking out and purchasing material possessions, and I can see how it wouldn’t stack up against, say, working with orphans in an impoverished country. Nevertheless, I enjoy it. Not only do I enjoy it, I will go so far as to say I think it is a worthy pursuit. Shopping is seen as a rich woman’s activity, but I see it as a poor woman’s activity: Making good choices means you can have the good stuff for the price of the crappy stuff. You can have two of something instead of one. You can have this and that, instead of this or that.

When I shop, I’m looking for things we currently need, but I’m mostly looking for things we will need: the less pressured you are, the easier it is to get what you want for a good price. I don’t wait until our sheets are full of holes to look for new sheets, I’m always on the lookout for good sheets at 75% off. We don’t need them yet, so I can be picky and get ones I like. I buy clothes for the kids in the next size up, and even the next size after that. Not too far ahead, because fashions change and because it’s hard to predict who might need slims and who might need huskies, and because as kids get older they might want some say in what they wear, but I do buy enough ahead that I’m not scrambling to buy them a whole new wardrobe at full price because they’ve suddenly outgrown their old stuff. Basics like winter boots and snowpants, I buy several sizes in advance. I’m willing to handle a certain amount of storage and organization in exchange for paying $6 instead of $24.

When you save money in boring areas, you have more money for fun areas: save $18 on boring winter boots, and you have $18 more to spend on cute birth announcements, or a pretty green vase thing, or a new book. You also have more money in general: if you don’t buy the vase thing, the $18 is just extra in the checking account. When the utility bills come in, or when the car insurance is due, or when somebody needs to go to the dentist, it’s good to have those extra bits that wouldn’t have been there if you’d bought things full price.

New pair of boots bought in November for $24? Or new pair of boots bought in February for $6, plus new sheets bought for $18-down-from-$72? Shopping is not just the act of putting down a credit card, it’s the art of choosing. There isn’t a thing wrong with buying the boots for $24, but nor is there a thing wrong with enjoying trying to get them for $6.

I notice that if I eat something purely nutritious, such as a heap of carrots or a fruit smoothie, I feel a little queasy and “off” until I eat something like a Twix bar. I have wondered if, over the years, I have primed my body to expect junk, and so when I eat too much nutritious food I create a Junk Imbalance. It reminds me of when I read, years ago, that the reason carbon monoxide poisoning works is that even though your body can’t use carbon monoxide, it prefers it to oxygen. Your body will keep sucking in that carbon monoxide like it’s Twix bars, until there’s no room for the oxygen. This may not be the purely scientific explanation; it’s been a long time since I read anything about carbon monoxide. These days I’m more likely to be reading about Angelina Jolie.

I’m feeling a little yicky this morning. Nothing in particular is wrong, it’s more like a mixture of issues from the pregnancy grab-bag: a little short of breath, a little queasy, a little tired, a little crabby, a little sore. Plus, I had a smoothie for breakfast, so I have the aforementioned junk imbalance. I’m 26 weeks pregnant, and so this is the week my OB wants me to go do the gestational diabetes screening. I don’t really mind that sweet drink: it’s not delicious, but it doesn’t make me want to throw up. What I don’t like it sitting in the lab waiting room with all the people who look like they’re carrying mutant germs. I get restless and have to go walk around and put Germ-X on my hands for the tenth time in an hour. I’m sure this has nothing to do with the sugar in the drink.

I have a suggestion to add to yesterday’s sleep tips: have your husband tell you a long, boring story about a small, hard-to-find, complicated problem he encountered at work. Last night I was so wired I couldn’t even close my eyes, but then Paul told me just that sort of story and before I knew it I was asleep. Before you start worrying about Paul’s tender feelings, let me rush to say that he tells me these stories on purpose to help me sleep. He’ll see me lying there all wide-eyed and twitchy, and he’ll say sympathetically, “Do you need a long boring work story?”

Today’s 10-minute task was cleaning out the drain in our bathroom sink. It was draining very slowly, and all I can say after cleaning it out is NO WONDER. I’ve spared you the Before and After pictures. You’re welcome.

Today I thought I would tackle the twins’ closet. They were playing in their room anyway, and that way I could supervise them and also get the closet done. Oh, ha ha ha. Ha. That worked as great as you might imagine.

Here’s the closet Before. This is just the left half of it. As you can see, I have helpers.

Unlike my other clutter projects so far, this closet contains mostly items that really do belong there. However, clearly we have a “stuff it in and worry about the ‘where’ later” problem going on. We also have a “too much stuff” problem and a “time to put away the pink receiving blankets” problem.

This is a multi-day project, and today’s part was to see if I could do something about all the clothes I’ve been cramming onto the bottom two shelves. The twins are unfortunately blocking your view of one of those shelves, but it looks pretty much exactly like the one above it: completely full of disorganized fabric and plastic.

I like to buy clothes on clearance (have I mentioned I like Target clearance?), and put them aside for future sizes and seasons. “Aside” means, apparently, cramming them anywhere. All the sizes are mixed together, and what good does that do me? The twins will be entering college and I’ll still be finding 2T stuff in the back of this closet. Some of the stuff was still in store bags, some of it in some small boxes (an earlier attempt at inflicting order), most of it just stuffed anywhere it would fit (“fit”).

I got two boxes and put them on the changing table, labeling one of them “2T” and one “3T.” I put anything 4T or above in a pile nearby–I wasn’t sure what size box I’d need for that. By the time I had most of the stuff off of the two shelves and into boxes, I had this on my hands:

They were mad because I wouldn’t let them take down everything else off the shelves, nor would I let them put things into or take things out of the diaper pail even though I kept opening and shutting it enticingly as I got rid of plastic store bags and ancient receipts.

Time to wrap it up for the day. I put the three new boxes on the floor of the closet. The 2T box is overflowing, but the other two are about the right sizes, with room to add more things. You can only see two of the boxes in this photo; the third box is behind the sliding closet door, more onto the right half of the closet.

It doesn’t look a whole lot better, I realize. There’s no gasp factor here.

But there is some empty space on the bottom shelf, and the shelf above it looks fuller than it is because of a big winter coat and also because of me not doing any organizing yet: all I did today was take things off. Also, some bags of extra school supplies came tumbling down when I removed the wads-of-clothing support system they were leaning on.

It’s difficult not to get discouraged, comparing this project to the kitchen table and the bureau: those two projects, it made such a difference spending even 10 minutes on them—whereas I spent about half an hour on this closet and barely made a dent. But this closet has been driving me crazy, and I was worrying as the twins outgrew their 18-month and 18-24-month stuff, and I knew I’d need the 2T and what would I do then? So this is good work, and worth doing, and we will hold our applause until the end–which will probably be in about six weeks, at this rate.

For you: Today’s assignment, should you wish to follow me down this dark and dreary road, is to pick a closet or cupboard and spend at least 10 minutes on it. Tidy, purge, reorganize–whatever it needs. If you get to a point where you think, “But I need a set of matched organizing containers, or I can’t go on!,” don’t stop. Find something you can make do with for now (I found an old diapers box, a old moving box, and a Rubbermaid bin), and replace the containers later.

Sarah of No Whey, Mama has another question for us. She wants to know what we think of the idea of earning a little extra money by taking care of other people’s children in your own home, when you’re at home taking care of your own kids anyway. She’d like to know if anyone’s tried this, either as a full-time or part-time thing, and how it turned out. You can read the whole question over at her site.

I’ve considered this myself, from time to time. It seems like such a win-win thing: I’m here anyway, I’m watching children anyway, why not earn a little money? I always come down on the “no” side, mostly because I worry that I would get into it and then not want to do it anymore and have trouble getting out of it. Also, when we have playdates over here, I usually find I dislike other people’s children, even if they’re very nice children.