We’ve been kind of reticent about Kid Two. I’m not sure why that is. Did all of the excitement of having the first kid drain out of us before the anticipation of the second?
I was poking around the grocery store today looking for a magazine to read during lunch. It’s become a strange obsession these days that I can’t simply walk into Subway without something to do with myself other than eat.
In aisle number 4, a full-on lower-middle-class family was buying groceries, as I’ve noticed they are wont to do early in the afternoon. There were three women, one of them probably the mother of the other two. Later, I noticed the father of the boy who was sitting calmly in the shopping cart.
He was wide-eyed and observant in his little blue jeans and Ernie-striped shirt, and looked as if he had just learned to sit up last week.
Strangely, I’ve never been one to comment fondly on the looks of babies in such the way that Berta’s sisters would go on about how an infant looked “so adorable”. Even my own kid, who I admit now to believing - knowing - that she was quite the looker for a girl of 3 months, never spawned a “she’s so cute” utterance from my own lips in spite of the palpable necessity of passing strangers to do so.
And yet. I looked at this little boy sitting in the cart. And I would never admit that he was more cute than my own kid - and before you jump to conclusions, that’s not really the point of this essay or the truth - he was quite cute in his own right. He was just looking about, curious about the world. Unable to express his feelings about what he was seeing, and still raking it all in.
Momentarily I thought it might be worthwhile to go through all the diapers and bottle feedings again. Stairway gates and emergency room visits. Babysitting and potty training and preschool. Just for a moment I looked past all that, and that’s all it took to really sign on to the benefits of having another kid.
I got a magazine, but I spent lunch daydreaming of what life will be like for us in December when I’m playing baby games with my son.
