Back to Counting?

It's been months. Let me correct myself. It's been more than a year since I last posted here. And not, actually, because I've been too busy. Yes, yes, of course I'm doing a lot. We're all doing a lot. I have two kids and a husband, I work, I cook, I plan for vacations we'll go on in five years, I sleep, I socialize, I spend way too much time on the Internet.

There are plenty of moments when I've wanted to write in the last year, not necessarily on this blog, but in general: for myself, for my kids, for other unidentified human people. And, in reality, I've done more writing during that time than I did during the two years when I only had one kid. So, were I keeping an organized chart -- more kids versus no more kids -- that would mean one check in the column for more.

More kids equals more writing? I didn't see that one coming (and sort of doubt my productiveness would accelerate with more progeny). However, if that chart was really tacked on the side of my refrigerator, the no more kids column would have a lot more checks.

And that, you see, is why I haven't been blogging much.

If I saw this phantom check list, stuck between the soccer team list and the recycling schedule, while pouring my coffee every morning, it would startle me every time. No more kids? Happy with two? But the answer, for now, is decidedly yes.

And so I've taken a hiatus, probably because I wasn't quite ready to say it out loud yet, but certainly not because I'm not still intrigued by kid count. It's just that the premise of the blog was sort of me researching the perfect family size for us.

But even if we've already found that happy number, and perhaps also because of that, my cultural fascination with kid counting continues. And I intend to reinstate my research for all eager readers in the weeks to come.

Student sequel

I have a sweet follow-up to the post I wrote about my student who comes from a family of five children. See: ("the subtleties of kid counting") He was again in my office two days ago, discussing his final essay draft, in which he compared a Langston Hughes poem, "Mother to Son," to his own mother and the relationship he has with her. In the assignment, he notes that his mother had a child later in life, when most of her friends were well beyond their child-bearing years. This, of course, caused me pause, because my own mother had me when she was 42. (See the essay that spawned the blog: "An essay on the origins of the kid counting fascination")

"Are you this youngest child?" I asked my student, holding my finger on the sentence where I'd left off reading.
"Yeah," he responded, barely looking up.
"How old was your Mom when she had you?"
"45," he replied, raising his chin.
"Really? My Mom was 42 when she had me," I said, with, perhaps, a little too much enthusiasm in my voice. "And, I'm also the youngest of five," I added, without thinking.
I'd slipped.
He looked up at me, confused, his eyes saying, quite clearly: how do you, my dear English professor, know how many siblings I have?
I'm a kid counter, I could have told him, and maybe I should have. Family size is certainly a topic I would have liked to bat around with him. But instead, before he had a chance to utter a word, I told him I remembered his sibling kid count from one of his in-class writings (which is true, I'll have you know). He seemed perplexed, but satisfied, and maybe even impressed.
"How far apart are you from your next closest sibling?" I asked, breaking the moment of perceived awkwardness.
"Eighteen years."
Wow. There's a first. I've never met someone with a family dynamic so similar to my own. When I was born, my siblings were 16, 18, 20 and 22. When he was born, his were 18, 20, 22, and 24. I was, as you might suspect, dying to ask him more, more about how it was for him growing up, more about how well he knew his siblings and their children, more about how he felt about having older parents. But I didn't. We had an essay to edit, I had a nanny to relieve and an afternoon to spend outdoors (or indoors as the weather then dictated) with my sons. What I would have asked first, had it been more appropriate, was "Do you, 20-year-old you, imagine having a big family yourself?"

outdated post on Octomom

I say I write a blog dedicated to pondering kid size--and my oh my is Octomom dabbling in the large family lifestyle. It's shocking that I've not posted a single word about the mom of 14. Perhaps I was too busy reading about her to have the time to write about her. Embarrassing, I know. I've not been able to keep up with all the new updates on her family--new house, new toenail polish, new babies all home from the hospital--and, as I've stated before, her version of mega-family isn't exactly what I'm most interested in covering here. However, I think it bears back patting (my own, of course) that I foreshadowed the Octomom phenom back in my blogging heydey (before two kids hampered my blogstyle) in my Big Hollywood Families post. Here's a snippet:

There's lots of talk about how Brangelina is championing adoption, making it cool and Hollywood-ish to adopt from outside the US, but what about their sheer numbers? Will the size of the Jolie-Pitt family influence others (excluding those who are already influenced by religion or a lack of access to and/or knowledge of effective birth control) to make more babies?

Uh, yeah. Hello Octomom. Maybe the answer was obvious. Maybe I'm not as soothsayerish as I think. I definitely didn't predict that the mother of a brood bigger than Brangelina would also artifically adopt the same face as Ms. Jolie.

Scooped again

Lo and behold, I'm not the only one pondering kid count. See: "In an Era of Shrinking Broods, Larger Families Can Feel Attacked" from the front page of the Sunday Styles section in the New York Times a few weeks back. Per usual, I wish I wrote the article rather than read it three days after it came out, exhausted, in bed, settled in with a bag of Pirate's Bootie and a Vitamin Water sans energy. What I need to do now is cruise the 73 (most likely) contentious comments this article spurred. Maybe I can squeeze it in between the boys' bath time and the return of Survivor post-NCAA tourney tonight. Prioritizing has never been my strong suit, lest that wasn't already obvious.

the subtleties of kid counting

When I sat down a couple weeks ago to grade papers for the college writing class I teach, I was struck with a good, illustrative example of my kid counting fascination. I approached the stack of 18 in-class writing assignments on my desk in a post-teaching, post-lunch, long-after-the-coffee-has-worn-off, I'd- be-napping-if-I-was-home-right-now haze. And although I wasn't reading them with as close an eye as I might read some of their more significant essays for class, I still managed to uncover this lovely kid counting gem.

There weren't a lot of mechanical problems to fix in this particular piece--the author is a stand out in my class, albeit a young man with a persistent, quirky smile who I've had a hard time reading this semester--so I found myself fixating on a minor detail he'd added to bolster his argument: he's the youngest of five siblings, and at least one of these siblings has children of her own.

So there I was trying to get through the rest of the surprisingly insightful responses on how texting is or isn't impacting the intellectual and social skills of teenagers today and all I could think about was this student's family--his older sister and her phantom family, where he grew up, what his house might be like, his parents...

The next week, this student happened to be in my office for a meeting, and I've got this internal dialogue batting around in my brain, like: "Do I ask him about his family?" "No, he'll think it's creepy" "No he won't. He'll be impressed you retain so much from his writing." "No he won't. He'll think it's weird. He'll think YOU are weird." Did I say anything? Of course not. But I'm still curious as all get out.

Back to counting

Well...it's been a supersonic long time since I've written. Too long, I'd say. And boy do I have a list of excuses. The biggest being my boys (who don't do the nap overlap (yet. I'm still hopeful)). But it feels a little wrong to blame my kids for not writing when the topic I feign to write about is having more kids. Like if you do the math, how much more would I write if I had three instead of two kids--a less than negative amount, I guess.

This is the sleep-lost way of saying, I DO want to get back to the blog and I DO want to make it more visually appealing, ramp up the content, and get reader feedback, and I DON'T want to use this as a forum for talking about how easy it is to procrastinate and not write when you haven't slept more than three hours straight for a good few months, though you'd really like to be posting everyday and it's not like you don't have the ideas all stashed upstairs and eager to spill out onto your keyboard at inopportune times like 3:32 a.m. when your 7-month old is nursing for the second time since nigh-nigh. Get it?

So I'm going to set reasonable new blogtastic goals for myself:

1 post twice a week (more if possible, but not less)
2 Spread word about the blog (don't use it as my personal incentive to write, solicit opinions to inspire more writing).
3 make it look good--scarp the dot art interface and make it look like something you want to come back and see everyday, or every four days (as my new posting regime dictates).

So, get ready. I'm back, with a little more perspective on how kid count can impact your life (and your blogging).

High kid count around every corner

Without really realizing it, it appears I took a blog vacation for the past month. Why? I guess because I ran on fumes for most of August, and when the fumes ran out, all that was left was one exhausted mama. And so, today, I am emerging with limited energy during a limited window while both my boys are taking (hopefully) unlimited naps. I apologize if I'm a little rusty.

I felt like it was impossible not to come out of the clouds right now, what with the media teeming with examples of high kid count. I'll spell them out today and take them on individually in future posts. The top four:

Sarah Palin: Governor of Alaska, Vice Presidential candidate, Mother of five
Laura Bennett: Former Project Runway contestant, Blogger on Tina Brown's The Daily Beast, Mother of Six
Brangelina: Movie stars, Humanitarians, Activists, Parents of six (with rumors of a new adoption in the works)
The Duggars: Evangelical Christians, Reality television stars, Parents of 17, with another on the way

Got these down just in time. My window just shut. Little Reed is awake and threatening to head plant on my keyboard. Would my fingers ever again touch the computer in the afternoon if I had more than two kids...