New Little Dude

There aren't any rules about who gets to have kids and who doesn't, and I guess that's just as well, though we all know people who should have been steered toward hamsters instead. But let it also be said that every now and then the very best people become the best parents and might even have the best ingredients on hand when they're whomping up the little buggers. Like, maybe the chile is a gift to the whole world. Like, is it possible the new arrival will descend on a golden cloud with pudgy arms raised in benediction? Because we could use something like that right now.

That's sure how we felt when our friends' first baby rolled off the assembly line. We couldn't imagine a luckier child, and more than the usual effort had gone into his production. And now he has a baby brother. The docs said his mother was already "geriatric" for the first one, which seems rude and, as far as I can tell, means "over 26," but the point is it can be a bit of a challenge to seal the deal in these cases. Which makes this new one a plumb miracle. Oh, sure, lots of people refer to all babies as miracles, but just between you and me, some of them are a little disappointing, Lord And Savior-wise.

Thing is, though, that first child had tributes rained on him, toys and swaddling and onesies and furniture and college funds and what-have-you. We provided some of that rain ourselves, and I even made him a complicated quilt that took a long time to put together. Not nine months, but still.

This child?

Big Brother

Haven't sent him a thing. Big brother's old clothes should work--he doodled in them, but they have a washing machine. They'll give him a name at some point. We should probably send him something cute. Any minute now. We should, but we probably won't get around to it. He's already got something his big brother will never have.

He's the youngest.

And that's the greatest thing ever. Dave and I, we know. We're both the babies of the family. We had it made. The people in charge would snatch us out of the way of a speeding train but other than that? Go play. Figure it out yourself. Mommy's napping.

 

I'm the last of four children. Our parents were fairly strict. By the time I showed up (let's not pretend there was any planning involved) they were old, too. They didn't torment us with their visions for our future, but they definitely had standards for our behavior and were not remotely wheedleable. As a Brewster child, you might not get what you wanted, but you didn't suffer over thinking you mighta coulda if you whined long enough.

You wouldn'ta couldn'ta.

And even so, when all of us got together as adults, and I made some kind of casual but shocking pronouncement, and my parents shrugged and wandered off, my oldest sister looked at me in disbelief and said "You've done wonders with Mom and Dad!"

The number of photographs of me as a child are in the dozens. Yeah, sure, there are even fewer of my brother as a child, but those Daguerrotypes don't hold up. These days, first children are immortalized in pixels a thousand times a week, and the second child has to settle for his mug shot.

So listen up, new little dude. Your big brother is pushing Three, and he may be all walking around upright like a genius tyrannosaur and everything, but at some point  he's going to do some things, some currently unimaginable things, that your parents are going to want to talk to him about. They're going to want to talk to him about his choices and how what he does affects other people and ask what he really wants out of life, and with you? They'll be all, Whatever.

 

You grab that Whatever, child. That's a wide, wide landscape, and it's all yours. Go play in the mud, devise your own private troubles, and then shine, shine, shine.

They Stamp Them When They're Small

Several of you have sent me this photograph. Seems in 1913 you could mail a child, assuming you had correct postage. The child would ride the mail train accompanied by a letter carrier. Could this possibly be true? you asked.

Well sure. It wasn't even that difficult. There's no good way for a child to get lost on a moving train, even the ones that aren't properly wrapped in brown paper and string. That's not to say there weren't challenges. They would not have had benefit of the new peel-and-stick stamps back then. You'd have to carefully tear off the stamps along the perforations and either lick them or apply them to a reliably damp portion of the child. And if the child were to gain weight on the journey, it could come postage-due, running the risk that Grandma might evaluate the item and conclude it wasn't worth the price.

We weren't mailing children when I was a letter carrier, but we certainly carried chickens and crickets and boxes of mealworms and the like. I would think it would be possible to mail a child today as long as it could be crammed into the flat-rate box, but I've never personally delivered one. There was that time I was starting out on a nice walking loop and one of the Menefee kids asked if he could tag along. I said sure. We were just going around the block. He went up all the stairs with me and chirped away about this and that. I didn't realize there was trouble until we rounded the last corner and his mom was yelling his name at the top of her lungs. It probably should have occurred to me that he needed to ask her permission first, but it didn't. Hell, he was ten years old. Or maybe three, I'm not good at that.

But what could she expect? I'm a youngest-child baby-boomer with no kids of my own. I have no experience with this at all. Our mommies used to broom us out the back door first thing in the morning and tell us to stay away until it was time for our maintenance kibble. Nobody knew or much cared where we were. We had a few instructions--don't run with scissors, don't stick your butter knife in the toaster--and those were expected to hold us until we reached adulthood. There was also "don't take candy from strangers," but we didn't know any strangers.

Mrs. Menefee was too relieved to be upset with me, although she probably had a right to be. But shoot. The kid had to make do with a tiny back yard and a driveway and that was it. There were a bunch of brothers and sisters so the odds (I thought) of anyone noticing he was missing seemed low. Really, she's lucky I didn't let him slide around in the back of my Jeep, or bring him back stuffed with Wonder Bread and marshmallow salad. And make him do straight-leg sit-ups.

Heck. He got a whole round trip, with no postage.