Joshua's Spot

Baby Ben's moment in the sun...

It may very well be that the best measure of how quiet, gentle, and altogether placid a baby Benjamin has turned out to be is simply how thoroughly he's managed to fly under the radar - on this blog, as in the Real World (TM). So, with a little prodding from Auntie Tee-Tee (in the form of a gentle complaint that she has 64,392 photos of Josh, but about, oh, three of Ben), I thought I'd start trying to rectify that, in a small way. (Given that the momma and both little boys have been at a friend's house all morning, making Josh's Halloween costume, I have the luxury of a few hours to putz about with stuff like this.)

You can see for yourself that Ben is a thumb-sucker - something Josh never showed any interest in, along with pacifiers (he would never settle for anything less than the genuine article, i.e., 100% certified Grade A Momma Boobie). You'll also note that Josh continues to be very generous with his toys, up to and including his "babies" - namely, Boo Elephants. Ben, for his part, is just starting to realize that he has a brother, mostly because he wakes up to find some creature bigger than he is but smaller than Mommy or Daddy stroking his head or putting Matchbox cars on his chest or crawling into the play gym with him or cooing at him over the side of the crib. Eventually he'll figure out what Josh is good for - things like teaching him how to throw and jump and tell the difference between rocks (good) and dog poop (yucky) - but for now, he's mostly just bemused.

There's nothing ambiguous about his reaction to his parents, however. Whenever he sees one of our faces float into his view, his whole face lights up in this beautiful little-baby open-mouthed smile, and he starts cooing. Even on the hardest days, when Josh is being very, well, two - and there have been a string of those lately, days when I just feel like he and I are locked in a clash of wills to see who's the more stubborn - a few minutes with Ben, watching him smile at me and do his little baby "oohs" and "aahs" while he waves his arms and legs in excitement, are enough to brighten my mood. It doesn't take much attention to get him going, either. He's more than happy to get a few "boops" with a fingertip on the nose, or a pinched cheek or two, and that seems to be enough to be the high point of his whole day.

He's just starting to become aware enough, and in control of his body (particularly his head) enough, to make good use of the old stand-by entertainments, like the play mat, and the exersaucer, and the mobile in his crib (which has become a source of endless fascination for him lately). He watches the fish go round and round on the little mobile over his swing, and finds ceiling fans simply entrancing. But none of that will hold a candle to a human face whenever one pops into view.

I'll be sure to get some more pictures of him up very soon - in particular, I have something like 10 CDs of photos from Mom's last visit out here that I need to process and get up on the blog, including a lot of Ben (admittedly, they're getting increasingly out of date, even as I type). I've also been working on the videos - stay tuned!

Giving Baby Ben his due

Just in case you were feeling like we haven't been taking any pictures of the little one lately... here's some hard disproof for you.

There are also some new photos to be found in both the Boo's and Baby Ben's photo albums (yes, I got the USB ports working long enough to get some processing done, against the odds).

Josh, lest I forget to mention it, is also into a lovey-dovey phase - he's apt to come up and hug your leg, twenty or thirty times a day, and announce "I love you, so-and-so". Doesn't matter if you're Idi Amin, as long as you're in proximity at the right moment, he'll give you your lovin'.

He's also big into "thank you," which, to me, is probably more important. Here's hoping that we're on our way to a polite, affectionate little boy.

Placeholders, plans, and excuses

Well, so - here's the good news: there are a few new pictures in the photo albums. Well, not all of them "new" in the sense that they were just taken, but "new" in the sense that they're old-ish pictures that I've finally gotten off my camera and uploaded so you can see them. The one to the right is truly new, taken just yesterday - the rest go back as far as June. (Shame on me.)

The other good(ish) news is that there are nearly 1,000 (yes, you read it right) other photos waiting in the wings, either on CDs that my mom sent of photos she took while she was here, on on the CF cards from my camera. Not to mention several hours of video on three tapes from the video camera.

The bad news is that all those pictures and all that video are basically stuck where they are. My old computer is slowly dying, bit by bit, starting with (inconveniently enough) the USB ports, which are flickering in and out of usability. I can access devices plugged into the USB ports itermittently, just long enough to, say, import one photo off a card reader into Photoshop Elements - at which point the USB connection will be lost, forcing me to re-establish the connection before I can load another photo. Video works better, since it's over FireWire, but the software I have (ULead Videostudio 9) is so clunky that it's painful to try to get a movie out of it - when it doesn't crash altogether.

So basically, I'm still waiting for the new iMac to arrive before I torture myself any further trying to get this old Dell to function properly. Which means the pile of photos and video waiting to be processed just keeps growing.

Thankfully, once I do get the new machine, it'll be much less painful to clear out the backlog than it would be on the PC. I've been reading through the manual for Aperture 1.5, and am already licking my chops in anticipation, waiting, just waiting to see it do its magic on all those pics. And iMovie '08 sounds like it'll do a far better job of turning raw video footage into interesting movie clips than anything I've used to date on the PC.

Now, if I could just get my greedy hands on that iMac, I'd be all set. Unfortunately, there seems to be a huge backlog of orders that aren't being filled, for mysterious reasons - supply? Hardware issues? My reseller pissed off someone at Apple and won't get a machine out of them until the moon turns blue? Who knows.

I just hope they get that iMac here before I throw the Dell over the side of the hill...

The kids, meanwhile, have been presenting their own challenges this week. Josh has discovered the fine art of changing his mind, much to my annoyance. He'll be standing there holding, say, a plastic orange, and suddenly announce, "I don't want the orange." (To which I'll say, "Fine, then put it down.") Yesterday he changed his mind four times about what he wanted to wear to school - he wanted the white socks, then no, the red ones; the brown shoes, then, no, the red ones; to wear the froggy raincoat, then no, no froggy raincoat... until I finally got so fed up with changing him back and forth that I gave him a time out and told him he was going to school in whatever he had on his back when I was ready to leave. He's been expressing his opinion about what he wants and doesn't want a lot in general, which I suppose is a sign of important progress in developing and expressing a sense of self - but man, can it grate on the nerves at times.

Ben, meanwhile, has finally awakened from his protracted post-delivery slumber, and now wants to play. Which is great, it's wonderful to see him awakening to the world and wanting Input at long last, instead of just napping and eating and pooping and napping again, but running from one little boy to the other for 12 hours a day more or less non-stop has been exhausting the past few days. I'm beginning to see why some parents are so adamant about the need to put kids on a schedule - not for the kids' benefit, but for the parents'. Knowing that however badly they're running you ragged at the moment, there'll be a three-hour period in the middle of the day when they're all safely locked up and quiet would be a great relief. If only I could get Ben to quiet down and stop eating us out of house and boobie long enough to take a solid nap in the middle of the day, while Josh is sleeping, I'd be all set.

Night-time is a different matter - Ben is turning out to be, in addition to a champion eater (something Josh never was, and still isn't), a world-class sleeper. For several nights in a row now, he's slept solidly from about 8pm to 3:30am. That's more than seven hours, folks - and he's just two months old today. People kept bragging to me that their 6-week-old kid would/did sleep through the night, and kept asking how Josh was doing and expressing pity and urgency about the fact that he still wasn't sleeping through the night at nearly a year old - and I thought they were just making the whole thing up. Until Ben came along, that is.

Now, of course, we're getting all anxious in the middle of the night, getting up to check to make sure he's still breathing, because it just seems so unnatural that such a little guy could sleep that long. I guess we're just not the types to be satisfied. Go figure.

Sleepless in... well, not Seattle, anyway

Here's where my complacency about having the second baby starts to bite me in the behind.

I guess I'd vaguely remembered that Josh did most of his sleeping during the day when he was a newborn, and kept us up most of the night - and that he didn't start sorting that out until we put him in the nursery in his own crib, when he was something like six weeks old. And I suppose I vaguely realized that we'd be somewhat short on sleep for the first few weeks or months after Baby Ben came along, and thus prepared myself by trying to get as much done as possible around the house before he came along, figuring I'd be too busy and/or tired once we had a little bundle of hunger and gas plopped down in the middle of our lives again. Otherwise, I was shockingly unconcerned about the whole thing.

The reality, not surprisingly, is a little harder to deal with.

It's truly amazing - this little bugger will sleep quietly and cutely all day long, unfazed by a big brother running yelling around the house, dishes crashing, phones ringing, car doors slamming, dog barking, tactical nukes going off on the other side of the valley... (Just seeing if you're more awake than I am, there...) All day long, he's a not-very-animate lump. He'll wake up to quaff down some booby every so often, and he'll definitely wake up (and complain) when you change his diaper or get him dressed (he has a lot in common with his big brother on that account), but otherwise he's a perfect little somniac from dawn to dusk. He'll even fool us into thinking we should go to bed, as he quietly drones on in blissful dreaminess around 8 or 9 pm, when we're getting drowsy ourselves.

The moment we turn the lights off and try to go to sleep, however - and I kid you not, it's THAT MOMENT precisely - he wakes up and becomes Mr. Peripatetic for the remainder of the night. He wants booby. Then he gets gassy and growls and whines and squirms for an hour trying to get it out (and even if you do a really good burp job on him, there's always more methane in there bubbling to get out). Then he's Mr. Look-Around, wide-eyed and perky, checking out the world - which he'd have a great deal more luck with if he'd do it when it isn't pitch dark because we're trying to sleep, thankyouverymuch! Then it's back to the booby again, and the whole cycle starts all over again. Forget about sleeping in the bassinet, too - just like his big brother, he wants nothing to do with it, not when he could be nestled all warm and cozy next to mommy's booby. (Don't tell Dr. Steve that we're co-sleeping, he'd have a water buffalo.)

I've been wandering around bleary-eyed and largely useless for the past two and a half weeks, grumping at people more or less at random and getting zippo accomplished, up to and including keeping the blog up to date. I take the baby out of the room at about 6am every morning to give Felicia a break and let her catnap for an hour or two, after which she generally staggers out looking totally blinkered and nonfunctional, only to be greeted by an all-too-awake Joshua who's eager to have some Momma Time - not to mention a hungry and crying Baby Ben, who wants his booby. Surprisingly, Felicia seems to do okay by the time the afternoon rolls around - I'm not sure where that second wind of hers comes from, but I want one. Me, I just go progressively downhill as the day goes along, until by mid-afternoon I'm like an extra from "Night of the Living Dead." Every third night or so, I escape to the couch, more often than not at Felicia's urging, just so I can recharge my sleep batteries enough to get by (barely) for another couple days.

Other than the sleeping thing, though, things are pretty well on an even keel around here. Ben is growing by leaps and bounds - as of last Friday, he was already up to 8 pounds 9 ounces, which means Felicia's breastmilk must be the basis for one of those bodybuilders' weight-gain formulas, you know, the ones that promise you'll go from Weeny-Boy to Mr. Universe in six hours by drinking their super-shakes. (Maybe I should try some...) Josh shows every sign of being a great big brother, giving Ben kisses all the time, sharing his toys (usually by putting them on Ben's head), and generally watching out for the little one. Grandma Kay can typically be found glued to the baby, whose favorite daytime sleeping spot is cuddled up in the crook of his grandma's elbow, or over her right shoulder. Gimli, meanwhile, just lies around in the same spot in the playroom, with this long-suffering look on his face, waiting for Grandpa to come back from his business trip.

We'll manage. But man, my kingdom for a good, solid, Boo-style three-hour nap...

Baby Ben came EARLY, thankyouverymuch

Felicia had this whole plan for this past weekend, see.

First, on Friday afternoon, she was going to get out of work early. My parents were to watch Josh overnight while Felicia and I went to Ashland to stay at a little bed and breakfast. Felicia was going to get a pedicure, we'd go out for a really nice dinner at Amuse (one of those swank white-tablecloth-tiny-serving-huge-bill-great-flavor kind of places), and spend the evening (finally) talking and discussing the pregnancy, which we've never really had a chance to sit down and focus on together, given all the other busy-ness in our lives lately. Saturday morning, we were going to get a couple's massage together, then we'd go back to Grants Pass in time for Felicia to go to a friend's baby shower. We'd catch the new Harry Potter movie that evening, then Sunday morning we were going to have a whole bunch of friends over for brunch, at which Felicia would make one of her special super-sweet breakfast concoctions that just make everyone drool. Sunday evening we were going over to Liz and Steve's house to be gracious guests at a dinner they were throwing for a potential recruit to Liz's practice. Then Monday (as in, yesterday) Felicia had a whole day of patients scheduled, along with a surgery in the morning, and she was supposed to take call today and tomorrow for the last time before Flippy arrived.

She'd been talking at one point about taking the boat out with my parents at Howard Prairie on Sunday, as you may recall - but I did finally manage to convince her that that might be tempting fate a bit. Just as well, as it turns out.

Felicia had this whole thing under control, you see, and she Had A Plan. I kept asking whether or not she'd checked with Flippy to see if he had a Plan too, and if it involved the same things as her Plan, but she assured me that, as a mere fetus, Flippy wasn't allowed to have a Plan.

Well, Baby Ben started off life by showing his Momma just who is in charge around here - which probably doesn't bode well for the future.

It's all the fault of our friend Eliza, who apparently couldn't remember exactly when Ben was due, but thought somehow that it was last week - so she called Friday morning to wish Felicia a "happy Labor Day," ha ha. Apparently Eliza, as the outgoing president of our temple, has some special pull Up There, because just a few hours later things started moving awfully fast.

Felicia had been saying Thursday night that she was starting to feel pretty uncomfortable. She said it wasn't quite as bad as it was the day she went into labor with Josh, when she had such ants in her pants at lunch that she couldn't sit still, so she thought she still had some time - but she did lay down the law and tell me we couldn't have any sex over the weekend, because she had patients to see on Monday. She was still feeling pretty "uncomfortable" (as she put it, rather vaguely and unhelpfully) when she left for work on Friday morning, but not so much so as to miss her surgery in the morning, or to prevent her from seeing almost her entire load of patients.

I guess she was down to the last three patients on her schedule, around 12:30 or 1pm, when she started feeling really uncomfortable, to the point where her medical assistant asked her if she was feeling okay. She decided it would probably be a good idea to have her partner examine her - and Dr. Battey promptly shipped her up to the Labor Floor, 2-3 cm dilated and 80% thinned out, with the baby already dropping.

About this time, I, your faithful correspondent, was in the middle of a frenzy of projects that I was trying to finish up around the house, both in preparation for the baby's arrival (like finishing up Josh's new room, helping my mom reorganize the nursery to prepare it for a baby again instead of a toddler, and so forth) and in preparation for the fact that after the baby's arrival I would have a bunch of other projects that would be highly unlikely to get done anytime in the foreseeable future (like reorganizing the garage so we can actually use it again, spraying weeds, potting plants, cleaning out the mudroom, taking truckloads of stuff down to Goodwill, and so on). So I was standing on top of a ladder in the garage, covered in sawdust and drywall powder and sweat, hanging shelves from the ceiling and stashing away boxes and old baby toys, when I got a call on my cell phone from Felicia saying she was heading up to the Labor Floor.

It took me a minute to realize she didn't mean she was going up there to round on her patients, but was going up there to become a patient. And that's when the panic set in.

See, Felicia was so sure that she was going to deliver this baby exactly on his due date, as she did with Josh, that she hadn't packed one... single... thing. No hospital bag ready and waiting to go. Not even a list of the things that she was planning on putting in it. We had vaguely agreed that her step-dad, Mike, was going to watch Josh while we were at the hospital, and that my parents and Felicia's mom would be in the room for the labor, but that was about as far into the planning as we'd gotten. We had NOTHING ready. We were so unprepared that our bassinet was still locked up in the house of a colleague of Felicia's from work - who had since moved to Orlando, leaving the house (with our bassinet in it) on the market, and we didn't even know who had the key.

So I spent the first 30 minutes or so of my second child's labor racing around the house in an absolute panicked flurry of motion, trying to a) figure out what we needed to pack, b) find it in the middle of the mess our house has become in the midst of all this reorganization, and c) pack it in whatever luggage I could find in the middle of the mess. Do I know where Felicia keeps her nursing bras? No. Do I know what underwear she considers suitable for post-partum wear? No. (But I can bet it's not the stuff *I* normally pay attention to.) Do I have a clue what type of maxi pad she'd need? No. I'm lucky I can tell the difference between maxi pads and tampons, and she's darn fortunate she got maxi pads at all.

Somehow, I managed to get most of the right stuff into the car, and Grandma Kay and I raced to the hospital - I, for one, half-convinced that I was going to miss the whole thing. Turns out I was half-right - I missed pretty much the whole pre-epidural part of the labor, which is just FINE BY ME, thanks. Darryl had just finished inserting the needle when I trotted in, so I got to see all of about four contractions before the happy juice kicked in.

So there we were - NOT in Ashland, with Bubbe and Poppy Mike caught in line at Costco in Medford, half an hour away, Pop-Pop stuck at home with Josh while Da Boo took his nap until Mike could get back from Medford to take over the Boo-sitting duties, and Felicia... well, Felicia was bemused at how quickly it had all happened, and kind of bleary-eyed at the thought that we weren't going to get to have our nice, quiet weekend-for-two in Ashland to bond before the baby came, but she rolled with the whole thing and seemed pretty happy, especially once the epidural really kicked in.

Joanne got there not long after, and my dad showed up and took over the videography duties from me, which is kind of a mixed blessing because on the one hand I could focus on my laboring wife, but on the other hand Dad tends to shoot a lot of video of feet and crotches and things when he forgets to turn off the camera, and then miss the important stuff because he does turn it off when he thinks he's turning it on. Steve got there around 4:15 or so, when I finally realized that no one else had notified him that his newest patient was on the way and gave his office a call.

And it wasn't long after that, while my dad was filming all of us just chatting away and having a good time, that Felicia suddenly looked sideways at the monitor, peering intently at the strip, and then not 20 seconds later Dr. Battey and the nurse came in, already gowning up and wheeling in a cart full of torture implements and basins to catch blood and gore, and suddenly Felicia's legs were up and Battey was in the bullpen getting ready to play catcher, and the nurse was helping my mom gown up (since she was going to help deliver Ben, just as Bubbe Joanne had helped deliver Josh), and then not (I kid you not) three minutes later you could see the hair, and Felicia pushed about two more times and suddenly there's a head popping out, and then the shoulder, and then a whole little baby.

The labor lasted maybe 3-1/2 hours, the pushing maybe five minutes, and there was Baby Ben - 7 pounds 4 ounces and 19 inches worth of him. He put up a pretty respectable wail, crying his lungs out for a while, and then promptly fell asleep - and has stayed asleep, aside from the occasional request for booby time and a few peeks at the world around him, pretty much ever since. (Unlike Josh, who came out of the chute with his eyes wide open and feeling perky and alert - perhaps because his labor was longer and more stressful, for him at least - Ben is a sleepy little guy. When he does look around, it's usually with just one eye, to the point where I've started calling him "Squinty" and talking to him in my best "argh mateys" pirate voice.)

It was a beautiful, nearly perfect delivery, and made Felicia look like a pro. The only downside to it was that it was just over so fast that we were still adjusting to the fact that it was happening by the time it was all done.

We spent Friday night in the hospital, doing our best to sleep. Thankfully, the night shift who happened to be there that evening were really good about leaving us alone - in contrast to our experience after Josh's delivery, when it seemed like someone or other was coming in every half hour or so all night long. Of course, nothing can really make a bench seat under a window very comfortable as a bed (for me), and breastfeeding off and on all night long is never a great way to get a solid night's sleep (for Felicia), but all things considered, we had a pretty quiet, peaceful night.

The next morning (Saturday), my parents brought Josh up to the hospital to meet his new baby brother. I met him in the hallway outside our room - once he spotted me, he took off down the aisle yelling "Daddy!!" with his arms and legs flying all over the place. (I videotaped the whole thing, so when I edit it for film I'll be sure to run it in slow motion with the "Chariots of Fire" theme in the background.) Then I took him in to see his momma and Baby Ben, and he ran right to Felicia, climbed up on the bench seat with her, gave Ben a nice, gentle kiss on the top of his head, and said "tiny feet!"

Josh has been really good with Ben. He gives him lots of kisses. He gave him not one, but both Boo Elephants - a true, unmistakeable sign of approval and welcome. He shares his Matchbox cars with him (i.e., he puts a heap of them on top of his blankets and in his swing, so Ben winds up buried in little cars after not very long). Yesterday morning, we gave Ben a bath, which of course made him cry. Josh was "helping," and was pretty distressed to see his baby brother so upset, so he told Felicia, "Mommy, take care of him! He doesn't like it! Take him out!" Mind you, he's also been more moody, whining more often, demanding more attention, saying "no" a lot - but I guess some adjustment problems are to be expected.

As it turns out, we'd just given Josh his first night in his new "big boy room" Thursday night, freeing up the nursery while at the same time giving Josh an official transition into "big boy-dom". He loves the room, and it's been surprisingly easy to get him to sleep in his new bed - I think he really likes being able to go in there, shut the door in his Daddy's face, and climb into bed with all his stuffed animals and all his Matchbox cars, without having to rely on someone else to hoist him into a crib. He treasures his independence, and still says "do self!" anytime someone tries to help him. So having this great new bedroom, with its sailboat mural and fishes and nice soft blue carpet and big twin beds and bookshelves with all his favorite books already moved into it, is just right up his alley.

Ben continues to sleep pretty much all the time. He's also showing signs of following in his big brother's footsteps as the Spit-Up King, so we'll have to go back to making sure we're never more than three feet from the nearest burp cloth at all times. For some reason, being held by his daddy seems to make him hungry - I never seem to be able to hold him for more than five minutes before he starts hunting for booby, which I'm not about to try to give him (I learned that one the hard way with Josh, so I keep my nipples well out of reach, thankyouverymuch). He's already making normal-colored poop, instead of the black tar that babies start out with, and he only dropped 4 ounces in the three days before Felicia's breast milk started coming in (no long wait for the Milk Fairy this time, thank goodness!).

It's strange having a newborn in the house again - to have the breast pump paraphernalia all over the kitchen counters, the bassinet next to our bed, burp cloths everywhere, a car seat facing backwards again (which seems downright unnatural after having Josh facing forward for the past 15 months or so)... And it's truly unnerving to see how small Ben is. I keep marvelling out loud at how tiny he is, and how I don't remember Josh ever being that small - at which point Felicia points out that he never was (Josh weighed a good half a pound more at birth, which is enough to make a decent-sized steak). Everything about Ben looks so delicate, petite... and wrinkled. Funny how at the very beginning of a little boy's life, he looks more like a crotchety old man than he will at any point for the next 80 years.

Both Felicia and I have had our little bouts of post-partum bawling. Mine came late last night, when everyone else was asleep. I was standing in the door to the nursery, which is now half-disassembled, with some of the stuff moved into Josh's new "big boy room" and the rest shifted into our bedroom until Ben is ready to sleep in his own crib, in a few weeks. There's baby and toddler clothing strewn all over, the closet is pretty much empty except for some clothes hangers and a few odds and ends, and all the shelves that used to hold Josh's stuffed animals and pictures of the grandparents and aunties and uncles and Gim are now mostly empty, since everything is in his new room and we haven't redecorated for Ben yet. I stood there looking at this scene of abandonment and devastation in the dark, and just started sobbing. It was such an inescapable metaphor for Josh's transition from baby to big boy, and I guess I simply wasn't ready to let him go there yet. He's still my little baby, but now that we have a really little baby in the house, it's impossible to escape the fact that Josh is growing up in a hurry.

And the sad thing is, he's only two. If I start losing it this early, I can only imagine what it's going to be like when he goes off to college, or gets married, or has kids of his own.

My mom caught me at this, standing there in the middle of the house in the dark with tears running down my face, and asked me what was wrong. I told her, and she made one of her typically helpful, Midwestern-Mom comments: "Yeah, and it only gets worse. You think I'm ready for you to be 38?" (I felt compelled to point out that I'm, ahem, 39, Mom.)

So here we are - Felicia and all her boys. With a lot of help from Grandma Kay and Pop-Pop, and Bubbe and Poppy Mike. We're adjusting. Now we just have to make it through the circumcision on Friday... oy.

Baby Ben's first post

Shame on me. Eleven days before our second child is due to be born, and I have yet to dedicate more than a paragraph or two of our family blog to the poor little bugger. In some not-too-distant future, this will no doubt be cause for Child Protective Services to come swooping in and confiscate the poor neglected kid.

Honestly, it's all Felicia's fault. She makes it seem so easy, non-complicated, and controllable, I can go whole days without thinking about the fact that we're just a week and a half away (assuming everything goes according to plan, which she does) from having another little seven-pound-odd package of randomness dumped on our already plenty-random household. She's convinced that she's going to deliver precisely on July 26th, when "Flippy" is actually due - to the point where she's willing to go up to Howard's Prairie, 45 minutes from the nearest hospital, nearly 2 hours from OUR hospital, next Sunday, 4 days before she's due, and let the father of her child and the kid's grandfather go out on a lake on a sailboat (NOT the most panic-ready of boats) just to prove she's really, truly in control.

This, it seems to me, is just tempting God to re-assert control over the whole situation - given how much He loves a practical joke.

Flippy, for his part, seems (so far) perfectly content where he is. He's 6 pounds and counting, head-down, mobile but not kooky-crazy in his mobility... Just hangin'. Felicia was 1cm dilated as of last week, 50% thinned out, -2 station - "locked and loaded," in other words. And she's still working, just a little tired, just a little lower back pain, thank you very much.

We should just go ahead and have, like, 12. It'd be a shame to waste this kind of natural talent.