Everything Happened | vol. 241

Three kids, three years in or "three children with NO NANNY"

Polly turned three over the weekend. We got her the following birthday gifts:

Doll bed - This is my first kid to love baby dolls/dolls and I find it very sweet. She goes to a home daycare where there are a few tiny babies that she spends time with all day, I don’t know if that has anything to do with it. But she has slept with her doll in this bed in HER bed every night since she got it.

Working sink toy - This toy is inexpensive and so engrossing. Polly loves using the sink. We have one bathroom where the original ‘60s sink is wall-mounted extremely low (basically my knees touch it when I’m on the toilet) and she will drag a box in there to stand on and spend as much time as she can get away with filling the sink and “cleaning it” (soaking hand towels and then leaving them on the floor.) We had to lock everyone out of it. This toy is a closed system pump that draws water from the sink basin into the “real working” faucet. We had three of our friends’ kids with us for the weekend, and the younger four kids (ages 2-5) were all really into this.

Bunny nightlight - Polly loves flashlights and head lamps but is always pointing them directly into her eyes. She shares a room with her big siblings and they have reading lights by their beds. Now she has this soft, non-blinding bunny at night to hold.

Usually for my kids’ first few birthdays, they get a single nominal gift from us. They don’t really know what a birthday is and have no expectations. Grandparents are going to send stuff, and doting aunts and uncles.

It feels like age three is when you can really buy gifts for their “interests,” even if their interests are making a mess in the sink, blinding themselves, and being exasperated by the care of their baby doll who has been stripped naked for months.

Longtime subscribers know, but I wanted to have three kids, Nick and I disagreed about it, I made my peace with having two kids, and in fact became excited about being “done.” In January 2021, I got a tattoo of Jane and Desi’s birth month flowers (carnations and poppies) encircling a hand with two fingers crossed, intended as a protective talisman over my babies, something I couldn’t lose.

Just the stencil, playing around with placement at Globe Electric

Not even a month later and I became pregnant with Polly, a surprise. Jane was freshly two, and was at a full-time center-based daycare, years away from being school-age. Desi, 5, was home full-time doing kindergarten on Zoom, and I didn’t have a strong sense of when he would ever return to school, have access to after school care, or be able to ride the bus. We had a babysitter coming over 20 hours a week so that Nick and I could try to work, and the cash we paid her was equivalent to Jane’s tuition at daycare. We straightforwardly could not afford it, could not afford not to do it, were kind of trapped in H E L L as it were.

A little reminder from my home state, Ohio

This babysitter was also, I’m sorry, so bad. She would leave the house trashed from play, wouldn’t clean up after his lunch. I guess I could have told her this, but childcare access was so precarious that I couldn’t risk her bailing on us rather than endure a little correction. She was already the third person we’d hired for the position. I would wade out into the war zone of our living room every day at 4 pm from my “office” (bedroom) and dismiss her and then spend 45 minutes picking up after them. It was not exactly a scenario where I felt open to the expansiveness of the universe. My life was smaller than ever and everything was always so close to getting worse.

But yeah, the tattoo was scarcely healed when I emerged from my office/bedroom. possessed by a powerful full-body bitchiness that I couldn’t shake. For days, I’d been waiting for my period to come and undo the spell of pre-menstruation, get me back to a version of myself that didn’t want to do terrorism in response to someone innocently smacking their lips when they chewed, for example. An eerie thought bloomed inside me. That I had been feeling this immersive bitchiness for more than a week. Maybe close to 10 days?

Yeehaw

This third year of having three has been more difficult in many ways than any of the previous three. Polly doesn’t nap anymore, and she has been sprung from sleep jail aka the crib. It’s “full on” from the moment the kids get up in the morning until they all go to bed in the same room at night way, way later than we would prefer. Our kids barely do any activities but getting one kid to one evening commitment per week feels Sisyphean.

Recent dispatch from Bangkok

We have several friends whose youngest or only children are closer to Desi’s age, and sometimes I clock from social media or just from the neighborhood that they are hanging out without us. In low moments, it will hurt my feelings, but mostly I’m like, I get it. We’re a lot! You can’t casually have 5 people over for dinner, especially when one of them is a toddler. You can’t casually add 3 kids to a trip or outing.

This was actually my greatest fear when I was pregnant, that people wouldn’t want to hang out with us anymore. Now, mostly, that’s not true. But even when it is, I was overlooking the part where we created our own party. It’s always a vibe here, for better or worse.

After Polly was born, I wondered if I should expand the tattoo, get her November birth flowers popped on as an aftermarket addition. But Polly has always been there with the others. She’s the crossed fingers of what I couldn’t hope to dream for myself, and now couldn’t live without.

Previously: Three kids, two years in | Three kids, six months in | Polly’s birth story

yr mate,
Evie
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