Ask and Ye Shall Receive...Occasionally

Here’s the thing. When you’re having your first baby, (especially if first baby happens to be the first grandchild cubed, and the first great-grandchild quadrupled), you barely have to spit out the “p-word” before the gifts start rolling in. Everybody and their brother and their brother’s mother is excited for you. Everybody wants to give you something.

The gifts range from the extreme (a couple hundred bucks worth of goods from some distant friend of the family whom neither of you have ever met) to the extremely heartfelt (knitted homemade blankets and croqueted homemade blankets and quilted homemade blankets…and throw in a knitted bonnet or two for variety…) When I finally stopped counting I believe the Energizer Bunny had 14 homemade blankets, including the one I naively chose to labor hours and days and weeks over myself before realizing it would be joined in the laundry basket coated in spit up and by a permanent smell only a mother could love, by 13 other equally heartfelt and quite possibly better constructed homemade blankets, 17 brand-new store bought blankets and 12 hand-me down blankets. Not to say I don’t love every one. Of course I do. There are just a lot… Because a lot of people care. A lot of people are excited. And everyone wants you to know.

In stark contrast, there’s the poor neglected second pregnancy. You know, it’s not like no one cares, it’s just they ALREADY told you this. They already tossed you a couple hundred bucks for your first baby and they still haven’t even seen the kid. They already spent hours and days and weeks pouring love into a teeny tiny baby blanket that you so carelessly allowed to be spit upon and chewed on and torn at the seam and in the measly, pitiful three months that you actually bothered to use the beautiful creation in which they weaved a tiny piece of their soul, you only managed to get one picture of it in use (out of the 15327 pictures you took…after all, it was your first baby) and that can only mean you really didn’t FULLY appreciate the amount of effort and love put into the homemade blanket to begin with… So why the hell would they make another one? Why the hell would they buy another gift?

Fact is, they won’t. But it’s not that they don’t care. They do. It’s just maybe not quite as much. And even if they did care as much (which they don’t, not quite, no matter what they say), you’ve still GOT all the shit from the first one. What could you possibly want? Much less need?
But I DOOOO want things. And NEED things. No, really. Desperately need. All right, not a desperate need like an air conditioner in the Sahara Desert but more like a desperate need for a raise when your bills are already covered, you’ve got plenty of food on your table and you’re putting 10% in savings, just not enough for all the fun things you want to do. So you know, good ol’ fashioned American desperation for more stuff.

But we’re not going to be able to buy EVERY thing we (and by we I mean the baby and by the baby I mean mostly me) desperately need. And there’s no politically correct baby shower for the second baby. There aren’t oodles of friends to buy us oodles of things so we don’t have to spend every penny we’ve managed to save in the last three years on all the new desperate needs that we have (which is approximately 5 pennies anyway.)

So we asked. Against my better judgment, we put a politically incorrect not-quite-request out for more desperately needed shit. Hoping, hoping, hoping, that maybe we’d really get some of it. That someone would care just enough to fill in one or two of the huge gaping gaps in our already overstuffed nursery.

And someone did.

The most fantastic Female PILL ever (and most of us either have one, had one or are one, and let's face it, there still aren't many we can call fantastic) bought the fantastically overpriced (but new! and exciting! and patented…) sit-n-stand stroller for the second child. This baby will be overjoyed to know that her paternal grandmother really did care that there was yet ANOTHER baby coming along. At least she’ll know there’s one.