2.15.07: Love Means Never Having to Say “Grab the Baby, My Arms Are Tired”

Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
Sam Levenson

Love Means Never Having to Say “Grab the Baby, My Arms Are Tired”

February 15, 2007

Belated Happy Valentine’s Day, my little squirrels. It is very In to gush over this rose-tinted holiday; it is even more In to sneer at it. You and I, however, are wise enough not to do either, and will simply content ourselves with gloating over the hordes of candy we’ve amassed. Candy hearts! Chocolate cordials! Slightly wilted rose petals (they make a lovely salad)! At this point in our marriage, my husband’s learned the hard way to just lob the candy boxes in my general direction and seek cover as fast as he can—when it comes to love, war, and chocolate binges, I take no prisoners.

(Well, he doesn’t just throw chocolate—sometimes he throws rodents, too. I am still hoping that Tony will bring home another rodent this holiday week, so the Widget will have someone to snuggle.Then again, we just gave the Widget a little stuffed mouse toy for him to play with, and now it’s lying on the floor of his nest with no tail, no whiskers, no ears and no eyes. Apparently the Widget’s not into snuggles as much as dismemberments. How sweet.)

And now let us pull ourselves, trembling and bloody, from the smoking wreckage of the holiday niceties and focus on this month’s truly Big News: as of last Thursday, I am doubly auntified! (Meaning, of course, that I now have two nieces instead of one, which you would grasp immediately if you were paying attention to the saga that is my life. FOLLOW ALONG OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES.) My new niece is adorable, right down to her bubbly little farts. I especially love the way her big blue eyes flutter gently open and immediately fix themselves on her Uncle Tony with a look of such utter paranoia that you know she’s already heard stories about him. (They are all true, little one. Unfortunately.)

Somehow, I got conned into holding her, which was not a very wise decision on the part of baby’s mummy because I am notoriously prone to dropping things, particularly limp and heavy things that occasionally fart on me. Besides, infants hate me; they cry, they squirm, they accuse me of Satanic Ritual Abuse, etc. Surprisingly, everything went well—the baby didn’t cry, I didn’t drop her, nothing blew up or caught fire or turned blue, and I even remembered not to say things like “cocksucker” or “donkey show” or “atheist” while cradling her. After the first twenty minutes or so, my arm muscles started to give out under the strain (she is a very heavy baby), and I think my mother-in-law mistook my trembling for fear, because she kept reassuring me that I was doing fine and that I had a good touch with babies. (She also kept saying, “You’ll have one too, one day,” which I took as a threat—one day I’ll be peacefully drinking my tea and watching Hawaii Five-O when I hear a knock at the door and I’ll go over and open it and there will be MY FORETOLD BABY, lying like a deadweight, farting sack of flour on my doormat.) Fortunately, everyone was distracted from my awkward attempts at shifting the gruesomely limp burden by baby’s big sister clambering onto my lap and demanding to go to our house. Apparently our house has made quite an impression on her; she speaks with great fondness of the plastic squirrel that sits atop our television. She also wants to see our cat, which is going to be difficult, because said cat avoids visitors like the plague, and my niece is getting too big to squeeze under the bed after her.