large family

I was recently shopping for massage oil for my baby. Rather than read the labels I was selectively sniffing each sampler in my quest for the right smell. Is it surprising that the right baby smell happened to emanate from the “sensual” massage oil? It was almost funny – no, it was downright funny – when the cashier gave me an innuendo-charged look: do I really look like I need help in that department? Do you sell skunk-based massage oil and bath products? Because I’d much rather keep my babies more than 9 months apart. Really.

In the six weeks since my last post, my littlest girl turned 2 months, got really sick with a respiratory virus and is now turning into an adorably pink and chubby heartbreaker. In the six weeks since my last post my biggest girl turned 13 and made me a teenager’s mom overnight. I will write more on that later but for now, I want to tell you how my life has changed since my daughter became old enough to look after her siblings: my husband and I get to go on dates. But dates aren’t what they used to be when we had no children. Here is a snapshot of honest-to-goodness dates my husband and I had in the last three months:

1. The “Grocery”: Put the children to bed and head out grocery shopping. We get to argue about nutritional labels and how much sugar is too much sugar and why I never buy whole wheat rotinis because they remain chewy even overcooked. That’s when my husband realizes that I buy the fancy tomato paste and asks if this is how I squander his hard-earned money and I pretend to start crying and say “aren’t we worth $1.09 to you?” and the single guys with their cart full of frozen pizza and TV dinners think “just when you thought it was safe to go out…”

2. The “24”: Put the children to bed early, get yourself a treat – my husband likes expensive scotch, I like expensive ice cream – and head downstairs to watch our weekly dose of Jack Bauer. We don’t technically need a babysitter for that one.

3. The “Do you come here often?”: A variation of the movie date but we each see a different movie and meet for coffee after. Isn’t that awful? But since we go out to the movies once a year, we might as well see a movie we really want to see. And it’s not like we speak during the movie, right?

4. And my favorite, the “Who are these kids and why are they calling me Mom?” We figured that one out by accident when there was no table for eight at our favorite restaurant. They set us up on two tables for 4 at opposite ends of the dining room. The four oldest children – three girls and one boy aged 13, 11, 9 and 7 — got their own table, ordered their own meals and sent the bill to our table. Not having to deal with their minor table misdemeanors was so relaxing and we actually got to have uninterrupted adult conversation.

When it comes to keeping your sanity with six children, every little bit helps.

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Andrea adds: Now I understand why married folks have improved health outcomes. You bicker in the grocery store over tomato paste, but you are, after all, in the grocery store, buying tomato paste. I tried doing groceries and being healthy for a good two months in winter just now. It is very time consuming and inevitably left me with healthy leftovers, now stockpiled in my small freezer, which my Polish Wartime Mentality won’t let me throw out. So I have changed my tune, oh yes. Clearly, it is the right of every single person to have cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And then it is my right to demand socialized medicine treat me for scurvy.

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Véronique adds: I dream of eating cereal three meals a day. And according to cereal makers, they are chockfull of vitamins and nutrients!

My new baby turned five weeks last weekend and boy, does time fly or what? I am still getting the hang of surviving a six-kid family which may or may not explain the light blogging. Writing anything coherent is challenging on two three-hour stretches of sleep and the challenge is compounded by single handed typing: by the time the first half of the sentence is written, I cannot remember where the heck I was going with it. My days as a graduate student seem so far away and I can hardly believe I finished writing a whole thesis last summer. Today, I can barely keep on top of emails, to say nothing about birth announcements and thank you cards.

Many people think I’m brave to have such a large family. I think that “brave” is what people say when they don’t want to say “insane” in front of the children. I have been considered “brave” since my fourth child and I would be lying if I didn’t admit to questioning my sanity on a regular basis.

Recently, on a particularly hairy evening when my husband was away, the baby was fussy and the toddler was screaming his head off, I issued a teary “I quit this job!” to the world. The world didn’t accept my resignation and so here I am, as “brave” as ever, trying to juggle a modern life with three times the national average of children.

Over the last five weeks, I have developed a system of priorities deployed whenever the baby gives me a break. As soon as the baby settles down, I go through the list until she wakes up. The list goes a little like this: personal hygiene, prepare supper, tidy kitchen, fitness training and housework. I sometimes switch fitness and housework according to need: yesterday for instance, the bathrooms were so gross that Public Health would have closed the whole place down. As for fitness training, my rebel streak believes that a mother of six shouldn’t have to train to be fit… and so I sit on my extra 30 pounds trying to will it off my midsection. Last week, we were eating in a fancy restaurant and the waiter said: “Six children! And a seventh on the way…” To which my husband replied cheerfully “Oh, this is just leftover from the sixth” and I thought “Guys, a slow and painful death will be too good for you” and ordered the goat cheese crème brûlée to drown my sorrow. The baby sleeps so well in the jogging stroller that colic-avoidance and self-preservation should whip me back into the shape of my life by the summer. In the meantime, a brownie a day keeps the baby blues away.

That’s what I like to believe anyway.

A date by any other name…

One month check-up

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