Baby Chronicles

by Judy Baer

  Once we were seated, Chase, who normally says grace at our house, looked around at the guests and inquired, “Would someone like to say the prayer before we eat?”

  To everyone’s amazement, Mitzi waved her hand in the air. “I will.”

  I held my breath as she began, wondering what would come out of her mouth.

  “Lord,” she began, “I don’t know You very well, but Whitney does, and she says You are for real and that You’re nice. Whitney never lies, so I believe her. I just want to say thanks for everything—the babies, Whitney’s, Kim’s baby to come, and my threesome. I was afraid I’d never even have one baby, so if You had anything to do with this, good job. Thanks for our husbands and families and all they are doing. Thanks especially for Arch. He hurt his back pulling me out of the car the other day, so maybe You could take care of that for him, okay? And keep Harry calm. He’s worried what’s going to happen to the office, but he’s being pretty decent about it so far, so don’t let him get cranky.

  “Whitney’s food looks really good. She always prays ‘give us this day our daily bread,’ so thanks for however You got it here. Like I said, I don’t know You very well, but from what I hear, You are a great guy.

  “Thanks and all that. Amen.”

  Everyone found their voices at the same moment. “Amen!”

  I looked at Chase, and he pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and slid it to me under the table. Our fingers met, and he squeezed my hand. Quietly I wiped a tear from my eye.

  Harry and Bryan ate an inhuman amount of stuffing and yams, Mitzi nibbled on Godiva crèmes between courses, and Mr. Tibble and Scram lurked under the dining-room table like the mangy scavengers they are. All in all, it was a very successful meal.

  After dinner, the men retreated immediately to the living room, where they jockeyed for position in the easy chairs and on the couch and were all sleeping with their mouths open—except for Chase, who is a lovely sleeper—within twenty minutes of leaving the table.

  Mother, Betty, Jennilee and Harry’s wife insisted on doing the dishes so that “the pregnant ones” could rest. Kim is an honorary “pregnant one.”

  We sat at the table with what was left of the pies and made sure that the remaining edges were properly and evenly cut. We sculpted them like I do when I’m trying to straighten a row of brownies. Just slice off a sliver here, another there, and pretty soon you have nothing left.

  Suddenly Mitzi snapped her fingers. “I almost forgot to tell you, Whitney, I’ll need a couple days off next week.”

  “Are you going to another convention with Arch?”

  “No. We’re going on a babymoon.”

  “A babymoon?” Kim echoed. “What’s that?”

  “A honeymoon for expectant parents, a last time to get away before the baby arrives. It’s the new thing. Isn’t it a great idea?”

  A babymoon. What will the travel industry think of next?

  “You’re kidding, right?” Kim asked.

  “Not at all. We’re going to a spa. I’ve booked beauty treatments for me and tennis lessons for Arch. Breakfast in bed, nearby five-star restaurants, and shopping—what could be better?” Mitzi’s eyes gleamed. “And it will be very romantic, too. We can hardly wait. The airplane tickets are purchased, and I’ve already packed.”

  Most people ask for the time off before they buy the plane tickets, but that logic would fly right over Mitzi’s head. Besides, a spa and a romantic weekend with Chase didn’t sound too bad to me, either.

  “What do you pack for a babymoon?” Kim inquired, still trying to process the concept.

  “Sweats for the spa, dinner dresses for the evening, and chocolate.”

  “Chocolate?”

  “Sure,” she responded with sublime Mitzi logic. “If the plane goes down, I want the taste of chocolate on my lips.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “I could use a vacation.” I sighed and imagined myself under a palm tree. Unfortunately, I also pictured myself propped on a chaise lounge in a maternity swimsuit and floppy straw hat.

  Frankly, right now I’d be happy with a fake ficus tree in a nice hotel somewhere. “No fair that you should have all the fun, Mitzi.”

  Mitzi eyed me and then Kim. “You’re both looking a little pathetic right now. Maybe a few days off would help.”

  “Thanks, Mitzi. You sure know how to boost a girl’s spirits.”

  “When was the last time either of you did any traveling?”

  “I went to Iowa for a family picnic in September,” Kim offered. “We stayed in a tent and didn’t bathe for three days.”

  “Lovely.” Mitzi’s turned up her nose in disgust. “Whitney?”

  I thought hard. Apart from that weekend in Wisconsin, Chase and I have been working like fiends. “I looked up Switzerland one day on Google he photos were lovely.”

  “Refusing to bathe and looking at pictures on the Internet do not a vacation make,” Mitzi intoned.

  Kim brightened. “I had electrolysis done on my upper lip. I relaxed then.”

  “While someone shot electric shocks into your hair follicles? That does not count as a vacation.”

  “It’s not like Kurt and I don’t do anything. We go to movies all the time. Did you see Titanic?”

  “In 1997.”

  “That long ago? Really?”

  “Point taken, Mitzi, but it’s not always so easy to get away. Kim has Wesley, and I…”

  My mind went to the piles of unironed shirts in my laundry room from my good-housewife period, when I announced that I could do Chase’s shirts just as well as the laundry. I recalled the piles of stuff and boxes we’d moved out of the spare bedroom to make room for baby, and how they filled up the third stall of our garage, forcing Chase to leave our lawn mower and snowblower outside. As my thoughts ricocheted to the list of things I wanted to finish before the baby came, I saw myself unable to leave home until sometime in 2030.

  “Frankly, Mitzi, it’s easier to deploy the National Guard to Timbuktu than it is to get Wesley ready for a weekend away from us. Clothes, toys, vitamins, bedtime instructions…”

  “They’re supposed to be portable at this age, Kim. You’re just making it too difficult,” Mitzi scolded. “I don’t know why you think everything is so hard.”

  I smiled nastily to myself. Just wait, Mitzi, until you have three babies to haul around every time you want to go somewhere. You don’t know the meaning of hard yet. Soon you’ll be able to define impossible.

  Feeling a little guilty for my uncharitable thoughts, I put in a good word for Mitzi’s point of view. “An overnight wouldn’t be so bad, Kim. Maybe Mitzi and I could each watch Wesley for a night, and you and Kurt could have a weekend away.”

  The expression on Mitzi’s face told me that suggestion was going to fly like a lead balloon. Mitzi’s idea of “helping” is limited to telling people what to do, not actually implementing it.

  Kim brightened. “We could go camping.”

  I shuddered, remembering family camping trips from my childhood.

  It was genetically impossible for my parents to remember everything they needed to make a camping trip, if not pleasant, at least tolerable. It was usually something important that they forgot—cots, coolers, bug spray, maps. Once they forgot my sleeping bag, and I had to sleep with my mother in hers. She was suffering from a sinus malady at the time, and snored and snorted like a cross between a diesel engine and a crazed bull. Although my mother weighs barely a hundred pounds soaking wet, she commands a large presence—particularly in a sleeping bag. It was like sleeping with a Great Dane in a twin bed. I was eight years old when we left on that camping trip. I was twenty by the time we finally got home again. First thing I did when I got out of the car was run into the bathroom and check for gray hairs.

  Then Mitzi dropped another bombshell.

  “By the way, I’ve had an offer to do some designs for a manufacturer of maternity clothes. They loved my ideas for mothers of multiples.”

 
; It shouldn’t have surprised me. Mitzi really shows talent in that area. Although I grouse about being her guinea pig, I enjoy the things she’s asked me to wear. Except, of course, for that diaphanous peach-and-white number that made me look like a Creamsicle on steroids, and the stiff khaki-and-green dress that made me resemble a very large, slightly rotted cantaloupe.

  “Does this mean you’re going to leave Innova?” Kim asked.

  Mitzi looked at us in amazement. “Quit? I couldn’t quit. You guys would be lost without me!”

  Not lost exactly…

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Just what I’m doing now. My cleaning lady is delighted with the extra money.”

  “And you?”

  Mitzi frowned. “At first I thought I’d take the money and run, but I guess I’ve been hanging around you guys too long.

  “For the time being, the money will go to a program to teach teenage unwed mothers how to parent. Maybe later I’ll find something else to donate it to. You’re always tithing at church, Whitney. I figure if you can do it, then I certainly can, too.”

  Now this is the kind of one-upmanship I can live with.

  “What a wonderful idea.”

  Mitzi batted her eyelashes and said demurely, “I know.”

  After she and the others left, Kim and I marveled at what was happening in Mitzi’s life.

  “This is a God thing,” Kim kept repeating. “Definitely a God thing.”

  I believe that, too. I’ve been praying for her for a long time. Once Mitzi really puts her—currently considerable—weight down on God’s side, it’s going to be amazing.

  I walked Kim and Kurt to the door, while Chase went ahead with Wesley and chased him around the yard to run off a little steam before putting him in his car seat. Kim joined their game, but Kurt grabbed my arm and held me back.

  “Whitney, I’d like to ask you something.”

  “Sure. Anything.” I couldn’t take my eyes off Chase and Wesley. Chase will be such a wonderful father.

  “Is Chase okay?”

  “More than okay, as far as I’m concerned. Why?”

  “He’s just a little off his game, that’s all. As long as I’ve known him, Chase has had boundless energy. He’s turned me down the last few times I’ve asked him to play racquetball.”

  I laid a hand on Kurt’s arm. “He is absolutely swamped. He’s been covering for another doctor, and putting up with the pregnant and persnickety me. Wouldn’t you be tired, too?”

  Kurt looked at my ballooning form and chuckled. “When you put it that way…”

  As they drove away, I rubbed my hand across my belly and vowed to work at easing the pressure on Chase. Maybe a babymoon would be a good idea after all.

  Saturday, December 11

  DANGER: BABY SHOWER:

  KNOWN TO CAUSE GROWN WOMEN TO

  REGRESS TO EMBARASSING INFANTILE STATE!

  ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.

  That’s what it should have said on the door to Betty’s home. Women were perched on every available chair and surface in Betty’s living room, all sucking candy pacifiers and trying to make origami diapers out of stiff white paper.

  Those present are, in their other lives, doctors, lawyers, corporate executives, sensible human beings. Yet, brought together for a baby shower, they began to vie for stupid prizes and willingly model old maternity clothes in order to win a case of squash baby food in the Worst Maternity Outfit contest.

  Betty, bless her generous heart, had insisted on giving us a three-way baby shower. We tried to talk her out of it. Purchasing gifts for three mothers-to-be is bad enough, but when you throw in Mitzi’s triplet factor, that’s a lot of gifts to buy. But Betty insisted. She’d gone all out with a Baby Brunch theme, which sounded rather gross to me. What’s the entrée? Babies Benedict?

  She put my mother in charge of choosing the games we would play. What would a shower be without games? Pleasant, probably.

  My mother loves games. When I was a child, she was the one always begging to play Chutes and Ladders, not me. I outgrew it almost immediately, but had to humor my mother by playing it with her until I was nearly seven years old.

  After unscrambling words such as dtaebesrfe, yattele, and cijprolet gintimov—breastfeed, layette and projectile vomiting—we were on to that old standby, Guess How Fat This Woman Is. As Mitzi and I—Kim bowed out due to a normal waistline—stood in the middle of the room to be eyeballed, the women unrolled balls of string and cut lengths to the size they thought our waists might be.

  “Well, that couldn’t be anymore humiliating,” I whispered to Kim. Several of the guests guessed Mitzi to be approximately the same distance around the equator as me. Until now, I’ve considered myself lithe and willowy compared to Mitzi, who will soon be rolling her stomach around in a wheelbarrow.

  “No? It’s good for Mitzi’s ego, though.”

  “Mitzi does not need her ego stroked. It’s already as big as her stomach.”

  “Touchy, touchy,” Kim chided. “I know you don’t like shower games very well, but your mother says the next one is going to be great fun.”

  Oh, yes. Great fun.

  My mother appeared from the kitchen carrying a tray full of label-free baby-food jars. “The point of this game is to identify what type of food this is by simply looking at it. The one who gets the most right wins.”

  “How will we find out what they are?” Jennilee asked with excitement.

  My mother’s face glowed. “Our moms-to-be will taste the food in the jars and tell us!”

  I swallowed thickly. The baby has been acting as a gatekeeper for the food I eat lately. If he/she doesn’t like it, he/she just pushes it right back out. And now I’m being forced to eat liquefied vegetables that I don’t even enjoy in their original forms.

  The orange family is well represented in baby food—carrots, squash, peaches, sweet potatoes—as is the beige family—bananas, tapioca, turkey, apple sauce and pear. The jars of prunes and plums looked downright frisky compared to the rest. What’s more, I can see why this is a challenging game. To win, one must have intimate knowledge of the differences between smashed apples and pulverized pears—not common knowledge in today’s corporate world.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Saturday, December 18

  If Americans eat ten pounds of chocolate per person annually, then, judging by the amount that Mitzi and I have eaten in the past few months, there is a small town somewhere in Kansas that didn’t get its quota this year.

  Even today, as Kim and I made Christmas candy—fudge, chocolate peanut clusters, pretzels dipped in chocolate, truffles—I couldn’t keep my hands off the sweets.

  “What am I going to do when this baby is born and my weight doesn’t change?” I asked as I licked a mixing spoon before putting it into the dishwasher.

  “Don’t be silly. You haven’t gained that much weight, Whitney.”

  “No? You aren’t the one who’s worried that the doorways in this house have shrunk. Chase has started calling me his ‘Little Bonbon’ because I’m round and full of chocolate.”

  I love that man. The more rotund I get, the more beautiful he tells me I am.

  There are advantages to being pregnant, of course. Those prenatal vitamins have made my hair long, thick and luxurious. My fingernails are so strong that I can use them as can openers. My skin glows, and my mother and Chase say I’m the most beautiful pregnant woman on the planet. Who am I to argue? I’d rather believe them than my mirror.

  “Have you got big plans for Christmas?” Kim asked. “I haven’t heard you talk about it much.”

  “Not this year. It’s too easy to lose the point of Christmas in the hubbub. We’re giving gifts to charities in the names of our family and friends, and planning on lots of time spent in church and with people we love. I’m looking forward to it.”

  “I agree. We’ve purchased a few toys for Wesley, but other than that, we’re planning on things being simple. We’ll need the money
when we go to China. That will be gift enough.”

  “Have you heard anything lately?”

  Kim shook her head. “Our dossier has been sent. Now we wait until the Chinese government gives us a referral. Right now it’s ‘hurry up and wait.’”

  I studied her face for signs of strain. “How are you guys holding up?”

  “Romans 8:25.

  “If we look forward to something we don’t have yet, we must wait patiently and confidently.”

  “And Hebrews 10:35?

  “Do not throw away this confident trust in the Lord, no matter what happens. Remember the great reward it brings you!”

  “I feel I’m in a gestation period myself,” Kim murmured. “Pregnant with anticipation. It’s been hard watching you and Mitzi, but I know we’re doing the right thing. I don’t need the experience of giving birth to know I’m going to be a great mother to this child.” She smiled. “I wish I had a due date, though. I’d like to know that I won’t have to wait longer than the rest of you to get my baby.”

  “I feel like I’ve already been pregnant eleven or twelve months,” I said with a sigh. “Why should you be any different?”

  “This place smells great,” Chase commented as he walked through the door. “Delicious.” He kissed me tenderly. “Like you.”

  “I’ve got good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

  His lips tipped in an amused smile. “The good news, of course.”

  “I have a great dessert planned—samples of everything Kim and I made today.”

  “And the bad news?”

  “I didn’t have time to cook, and you get to choose between a chicken pot pie or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner.”