It's raining babies

(and other irreverent titles)

Y'all, I am beat. I drove all over creation today with Miss Lily in tow but I am proud to say the baby shower was a truly enjoyable event (and those of you who have been to your share of showers know that's saying something). Please note, if you did not read yesterday's post, that this was not in any way a shower for me or some pending offspring. (I have to put that in there, it appears. I told Mary I was bringing Lily with me to the baby shower and she loudly and proudly informed her ballet teacher that "tomorrow is the baby shower for my new baby sister!" Cue immediate parental interjection.)

Then I came home and ran because even though I was exhausted, it was 50 degrees and not snowing or raining, but cut it short because for some reason the neighborhood was teeming with fast-moving vehicles and I don't trust my reflective patches that much.

So you get bullet points because I am about 10 minutes from incoherency.

*On the day that you will be seeing one of your best friends (and her extended family, other friends and such) and want to look your best, your baby absolutely will sleep like crap and wake up for the day at 4:30 a.m. Thank God for parents who are willing to walk babies and feed preschoolers so you can recoup some of that missed sleep.

*I tried to feed Lily before going into the shower and she managed to rip the front of my dress. Stay for the show, folks! Fortunately, the restaurant staff was able to find a safety pin, because otherwise, it went from Classy in Westport to J-Lo at the Oscars reaaaal fast.

*Your children will experience the Grandparent Effect, which will make them somewhat...feral. It doesn't matter which grandparents, or which kids, they all do it. So when your oldest two are riding bikes ("driving") on the back porch, your eldest absolutely will announce "I'm the mommy!", begin pedaling as fast as possible, crash into her sister's bike and announce "I crashed the car!" Yeaaaah.


*Nursing pads as baby gifts. Yes, useful, yes, practical. Yes, screams "Hey, hey, regardless of your infant feeding choices, for at least a few days, you'll be leaking from strange places! Let's have cake!"

*We had to play baby shower games. One was guessing unlabeled jars of baby food, which you'd think I'd be good at after three kids, but let's face it, most baby foods are some shade of orange, yellow or green, so when I ran out of obvious guesses, I totally wrote "soylent green" for a few spaces. I did not win the game. I will probably not be invited to many more social occasions.

*Your baby will be one of three babies present and will apparently find this some kind of competition. Therefore, she will by some law absolutely be the one who abandons her "cheery in the face of everything" persona to loudly grizzle through lunch. (Thankfully she's cute, people are kind and I had lots of nice space to walk.) I thought the other two were newborns, they were so quiet, but no, one was Lily's age. Superb!

*I found myself behind a really nice black Lexus SUV with plates that said DIVA, followed by a number typically reserved for a certain adult activity. Of course the thing was registered in New Jersey. I know I was totally surprised.

*Mary loudly, at dinner, asked my brother and his fiancee "after you get married, when are you guys going to have A BABY?!" causing me to, once again, loudly interject about how "we don't ask people things like that, that's between Uncle and Auntie, you have to be polite..." Points to my future sister in law for choking back laughter and benignly telling my daughter "Well I don't know about that but if we do I'll let you know. I'll call you." Mary is totally going to grow up to be "that relative" at weddings.

*My feral kids on the ride home had a long, loud, drawn out (LOUD) conversation about how they didn't want to go home, they wanted to go back to Mime's house, or Mim's house, but not HOME, and then Mary would announce she was going to "do magic" to bring them to said place. She would loudly say this, pause, loudly say it didn't work, at which point Anna would snap "BAD MARY!" and Mary would try a different magic word or location. All. The. Way. Home. That's an hour and a half of improv, folks. Oh. They also sang songs from West Side Story. They don't actually know many words to that particular libretto, but who's counting details?

Still good to see friends and family. Even nicer to see my bed in 3, 2...

It didn't work.

BAD MARY?

*