The slave driver amazing mom who leads my daily torture Stroller Strides class signed our local chapter up for the March of Dimes March for Babies happening on April 25th and asked for volunteers to walk with her. Now, I love babies (good thing, since this little ginger one seems to hang around me a LOT) but walking? Not so much. Walking in the dirt? Even less. Walking three miles up and down big hills in the dirt? I’d rather have a tooth extracted. Without Novocaine. And yet for some reason I signed up anyways. I think it’s because my desire to help save babies is a lot stronger than my incredibly laziness. I mean, come on, no one DOESN’T want to save babies. What are you, some kind of monster? Do you kick puppies too? If loving babies isn’t enough, check out this picture:

Awwwwwwwww! So cute! Plus like, RESEARCH and SCIENCE and MEDICAL STUFF. The whole point of walking is to raise money for the March of Dimes so this is the part where I ask you for $5 or $10 or $20 or whatever it is you were going to spend on Starbucks tomorrow. My team’s goal is $3000 but I figured if everyone who reads here on a regular basis could give $5 (I CAN SEE YOU, YOU KNOW) I could raise $1000 all by myself and really impress my Stroller Strides class.

You can donate to my walk by clicking on that giant purple widget to the right. Go on, you know you want to. It’s for the children. Such as.

Did you know a baby could kick your ass? Apparently Mother Nature didn’t think it was enough to give human infants adorable good looks and that intoxicating baby smell to ensure their survival – she also have them ridiculous baby strength, super sharp teeth and claws.

With his ridiculous baby strength, Baby Evan can smack you in the face hard enough to make your eyes water, pinch you until you scream, and headbutt your shins leaving big ugly bruises. He also thinks it’s really funny to hold the back door shut when you’ve just run out to the car…in the snow…in your slippers to find his favorite toy of the week. Then he laughs evilly while you try to inch the door open a tiny bit at a time so you don’t knock him on his head. Because despite the ridiculous baby strength, their heads bleed A LOT when they get cracked open. Trust.

With his super sharp teeth, Baby Evan bit me on Saturday hard enough to break the skin. Through a shirt. I’m going to have a scar. FROM A BABY BITE. How’s that for the least sexy injury ever? That’s almost as embarrassing as the scar my sister has on her knee from the time she was attacked by a vicious goose.

With his claws, Baby Evan can scratch your face off, although luckily he spends most of his time trying to scratch his own face off. Just don’t try to trim them. Even when he ripped off half his toenail and smeared blood all over the house like he was auditioning for the set decorator job on Dexter he screamed at me for trying to cut the other nine nails. He’s like a badger, clawing and squirming and your only hope is to sneak up on him while he’s sleeping. And never in the history of baby care has anyone gotten a baby’s nails so even and so short that they couldn’t still scratch your cornea if threatened. BAM welcome to a total lack of depth perception.

So don’t let their cute little hands and adorable baby teeth and toddling fool you. Never turn your back on a baby.

Yesterday, one of the mommy bloggers I stalk on Twitter follow, Kim from Dirty Diaper Laundry, announced she was pregnant. Another blogger I love, The Feminist Breeder, is currently deep in the throws of attempting conception, specifically trying to conceive a baby girl through the magic voodoo scientific anecdotal Shettles Method. Those two mamas combined with my sister-in-law’s baby girl (due in March) and Emmie Bee’s TWINS (scheduled to arrive March 3rd) and I am suffering from a severe case of baby fever.

I love Baby Evan more than I ever thought I could love anyone, but he was never going to be an only child. I dream of a house full of kids all gathered for family dinners and movie nights and summer vacations. I want my children to have brothers and sisters they talk to and confide in and fight with. And ideally, I’d like to have all those pregnancies over with before I reach an “advanced maternal age” (according to the March of Dimes, that magic number is 35). So if I’m 27 almost 28 now and want to have 4 kids total, I need to have 3 more in the next 7 years. A full term pregnancy is 40 weeks and I’d like to give myself at least the same amount of time off, so three pregnancies and recovery could take 240 weeks. So if you take 7 years and subtract 240 weeks then you get my biological clock banging against my uterus with both its fists and shouting.

Just as soon as I decide I’m ready to start trying, it’s 2 am and I’m up with Baby Evan and he still won’t eat any food and now I’ve started bleeding from my right nipple for no obvious reason and all my bras are ruined and I still don’t fit in my pre-pregnancy clothes and I cannot even imagine why anyone in the world has a second baby.

But today Baby Evan woke up smiling and laughing and full of cuddles. He’s started walking without any encouragement and fearlessly lets go of the couch to fling himself at the cat or the dog. He is loud and social and friendly and grabby and funny and loving. He’s growing up so fast I feel like the nursery door is the entrance to a time warp and ever time the baby goes through it we lose another month. If I have another child I could restart all the milestones – first smile, first laugh, first food, first tooth – and do a better job at the things that didn’t go so well – the start of breastfeeding, introducing a bottle, setting sleep patterns.  Maybe the next one will be a girl and our family can be balanced again. Maybe it will be a boy and I’ll be sadly outnumbered but very well loved. Maybe it will take me five years to get pregnant and our next will be our last. Maybe it’s better to give Baby Evan more time as an only child before we throw another full-time job baby into the picture. Maybe I’m going to spend so much time wondering what’s the right thing to do that E will end up deployed and everything will end up on hold. Maybe I’m already pregnant and don’t even know it and in four months you’ll see me on that TLC show giving birth in the Stop & Shop.

Sooner or later, I’m going to have to stop thinking about all that and jump.

Can someone PLEASE help me explain to my husband how hard and exhausting and exactly like a job taking care of a baby is? How although on the surface it might look a lot easier than driving to an office every day, in the end you get to leave an office but you never get to leave a baby? And how even if you don’t really, truly, 100% believe that being a stay at home mom is work it is NEVER a good idea to accuse your wife of “playing” all day while you’re at your Real Job? And not just because when you say shit like that your wife might storm out of the house and leave you dinner-less, but because it really hurts her and makes her feel useless and unappreciated? Yes, please help me explain that.

(Sidenote for fairness: in my uncompleted posts queue right now is an entry about how awesome E was during The Great Sickness of 2009 and our holiday travels. He slept with the can’t-put-him-down-or-he-screams baby almost every night and did at least 50% of the daytime comforting. He’s also helping with the night weaning, which proves he cares about my sanity at least a little, as it doesn’t matter to HIM if the baby nurses all night. But yesterday I did not care about any of that.)

From the point of view of someone who doesn’t have kids, my day looks easy. Get up, eat breakfast, workout class, hang out with friends, lunch, some housework, errands, computer time, start dinner, serve dinner, clean up kitchen, watch some tv, do a little knitting and then bed. Yawn, a life of leisure.

But when you do all that stuff with a baby it looks like this: Up at 6 am with baby, nurse baby, change baby, dress baby, make sure baby is occupied long enough to go pee, rescue dog from baby, run upstairs to brush teeth and put on clothes, clean up baby spit up, get the baby a snack, clean up snack, clean up baby, change baby, eat an apple, nurse baby, get baby and all baby’s stuff in the car, take baby to baby-themed stroller workout class, take baby to breastfeeding group, entertain baby while trying to have adult conversation, put baby back in car, take baby home, try to get baby to nap, nurse baby, rock baby, nurse baby, baby falls asleep, jump in shower, start laundry, finally find something to eat…and that’s just before noon. I could keep going but I’m trying to finish this post before the baby wakes up from his nap. As you can see, baby-free time is precious around here.

Now from E’s point of view, at least 70% of that “work” is my own fault. I don’t HAVE to go to Stroller Strides. I don’t HAVE to go to breastfeeding group. I don’t HAVE to go to the store with the baby. I can stay home. I can run errands on the weekends. I could, quite easily, never leave the house. Like, duh, that’s why pizza delivery was invented. I could also quite easily go TOTALLY FRICKIN INSANE and end up babbling incomprehensibly about poopoo and diapeys and numnums and nappy naps. I’ve already used all those words at least once this week. The edge is near.

It doesn’t help my case that on the weekends I try to give myself as much time off as possible, so E sees me sitting on the couch while the baby naps and imagines that’s how I spend all my days. Never mind the clean socks in his drawer and the toys in the toy box and the milk in the fridge and the food on the table. Never mind the baby is dressed and fed and happy. Never mind my lack of a full night’s sleep for the last 9 months. Obviously if I have time to knit a sock mitten wrist warmer AND maintain a blog, taking care of a baby is cake. And since our not-ever-officially-negotiated-but-status-quo relationship is I’m in charge of the household, why should he have to do more work after his Real Job is done? What do I mean I can’t unload the dishwasher and watch the baby at the same time?

I know I have friends and readers who are thinking to themselves RIGHT NOW that I got myself into this and it’s really my fault for having such an old-fashioned, gender-stereotypical marriage. You’re thinking you’re way too smart to marry a guy who doesn’t have a truly feminist and shared view of parenting so you won’t ever feel like this. And I hope you’re right. But I think every parent in every kind of relationship ends up feeling unappreciated at some point, be it every day of their marriage or just for a few hours once in a while.

The hardest part of this whole thing is sometimes I feel like I DON’T do enough. I feel like since I don’t earn a paycheck I need to earn the right to stay home. I feel like dishes in the sink or unfolded laundry or a funny smell coming from the living room (which turned out to be BURNT CAT VOMIT from where the cat threw up on a radiator) are big black marks against me in my Wife & Mother Weekly Performance Review. I mean, there are moms who have three kids and a real job and a house and a dog and still manage to make organic, homegrown, vegetarian lasagna every night with time left over to volunteer at the soup kitchen. I definitely don’t work as hard as that mom. I don’t want to work as hard as that mom. I want to be happy. I just want to be happy.

Get ready for a few days of babywearing posts! I’ve got a couple new carriers, some pictures and one adorable baby-sized baby backpack from my own childhood.

First up, some illustrations…

From "That New Baby!" by Patricia Relf published 1980 and probably given to me when my mom was pregnant with my younger sister. I love that it's a dad wearing the baby!

From "Open House for Butterflies" by Ruth Krauss illustrations by Maurice Sendak (the Where the Wild Things Are guy) published in 1960. I loved this book as a child, it's full of adorable nonsense - exactly the sort of things a 5 year old would think or say.

For some reason when I think of babywearing, I think of it as either an ancient-times-slash-third-world-country tradition (Gasp! No strollers!) or as a novel new idea I practically thought of by myself (I’m a genius!). Clearly based on these illustrations people were doing it in 1960 and 1980 and probably every year before, between and after.

(Mostly off topic but sort of interesting sidenote: I found these pictures in a big stack of children’s books my mother had in the attic. Out of the 200+ books I looked through not a single one had a nursing mother or a breastfeeding baby anywhere in their pictures or mentioned in the story. If feeding was pictured/mentioned at all it was a bottle. Most of the books were from the 80’s – when breastfeeding lost some of the upswing it experienced in the previous decade – or from the 1950’s – when it probably wasn’t discussed at all. A quick Amazon search reveals I’m not the only one who has looked for illustrations of nursing babies and not found very many.)