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outdated post on Octomom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.