Category Archives: Parenthood

October 7, 2024

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Six weeks ago, my sweet twin boys started kindergarten. After a pandemic babyhood and a scant two mornings a week of preschool, being students for six and a half hours a day, five days a week has been a very big adjustment for them. Thankfully, it’s one that they have adjusted to at lightning speed and they are now happy swimmers in the sea of elementary school.

In many ways, it has been far more of an adjustment for me. I have been deep in the moment-by-moment parenting trenches for the last five years and their needs and activities gave shape to my daily life. I welcome the opportunity to recall how I used to fill my time before kids, but the speed with which it all happened has been a little disorienting.

One of the things that I have experienced repeatedly since becoming a parent is how a piece of equipment can go from being absolutely vital in our lives to being completely unnecessary. I remember it happening with nursing pillows, bouncy chairs, the baby bath, the bottle warmer, the activity jumper they took turns in, and the gate that kept them safely out of the kitchen.

Our stroller will most certainly be the next thing to go. It still has utility for things like the 20 minute trip to our favorite playground or fifteen minute walk to our pediatrician’s office. They had their annual check-up last week and it would have been a very frustrating walk for me if they had both been on their feet. But compared to the days when I used it every day (and sometimes twice), it is approaching obsolescence.

The other thing that I think is starting to reach the end of its usefulness for us is the item we simply refer to as The Backpack. Originally we used a purpose built diaper bag that a friend gave us at one of my showers. Once the pandemic hit, it was abandoned because we didn’t really go out or take them anywhere beyond a quick walk through the neighborhood. Then, once the vaccines arrived and the boys got old enough for daily outings to the playground, the diaper bag wasn’t quite right and so I shifted to using a black backpack I’d ordered on a whim on clearance (similar to this one).

Since then, The Backpack has been everywhere with us. It contains all the things that we needed for a happy handful of hours at the various parks and playgrounds in Center City. That includes the snack box, a plastic pencil box filled with packets of the various bars and cracker packs that the boys like. The box prevents the snacks from getting crushed, which in turn prevents fits of hangry weeping. There’s a little foldable first aid kit that we use mostly for bandaids, nail clippers, and tweezers (splinters abound!).

A pouch of cleaning tools, including baby wipes, Clorex wipes, sanitizing wipes, glasses wipes (for when a kid inevitably lands a dirty finger on my glasses), alcohol swaps (mostly used for when someone steps in gum), a roll of diaper disposal bags (occasionally used to wrap around a child’s tush to catch an emergency poop. Philadelphia doesn’t have much in the way of public bathrooms), hand sanitizer spray, and little paper packets of ibuprofen (for me).

The bag has a secret stash of Dum Dum lollipops for when spirits need lifting. A pee bottle for emergencies (see above). A large soft sided pack of tissues for the constantly dripping noses. A large zippered pouch of toy construction vehicles and a smaller one of Hot Wheels cars. A hard sided plastic case of sugar-free gum. One large muslin baby blanket that serves as a towel in case of unexpected water play or a tumble into mud. And fresh water bottles tucked into the outer side pockets.

At the very bottom of the bag, lives a soft layer of snack crumbs, broken bits of leaves the boys tried to bring home, a few precious pebbles, a thoroughly dried out baby wipe, and wheels broken off cars that were played with so hard they fell to pieces. I clean it out occasionally, but the same things always gather in the depths.

When I had this fully stocked bag with me, I felt like I could handle any parenting issue that came my way. Are you hungry? No problem! Need something to play with? We have options! Are you hurt, dirty, or sad? I can fix that. Now with the boys in school, The Backpack is mostly unnecessary and so much more is out of my control.

I haven’t dismantled it yet, but it’s days are very clearly numbered.

Two Years Ago

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While I was waiting for the transfer to happen, I took a hopeful selfie.

Two years ago right now, I was in a strange, in-between place. A few days earlier, my first round of IVF had resulted in the retrieval of four tiny, precious eggs. Those eggs had been fertilized and were successfully growing in a lab a mile and a half west of our apartment. I was waiting to see whether they would continue to thrive long enough to be transferred back into my body.

I haven’t really written much about my fertility experience. Looking back at it now, with two energetic, sturdy little boys playing a few feet away from me, it doesn’t have the same weight that it did when I was going through it. But before, during, and just after, I lived with a balloon of hope, fear, and anticipation in my chest and throat that was always about to explode open.

I remember the morning I got the call from the lab, telling me that the fertilized eggs were doing well. I was at a busy farmers market and I started crying on the sidewalk. I was wearing my red vest and holding a bag filled with apples and a leafy bunch of swiss chard. In true city fashion, people just kept on walking by as a wept.

The boys’ very first baby pictures. The tech told me that these two embryos were so big that they couldn’t get them into a single image. I found that incredibly hopeful at the time.

On the morning of the egg transfer Scott had a meeting and so I went by myself to the appointment. When I got there, they told me that there were two eggs that were doing really well. One was slightly less good, and one had stopped growing all together.

The advice was to transfer the two most robust embryos, in the hopes that one would implant. I told the doctor (a woman I’d never met before and would never see again) that we really didn’t want to have twins (ha!) and she said that given my age (I was 39 at the time), there was a very slim chance that both would implant. Truly, the odds were against me that even one would stick around.

I watched on the monitor as she slid the delivery tool into my uterus and left two, tiny clusters of cells behind. So much hope. So much worry.

I walked around for the next ten days in a state of wonder and fear and deep curiosity. Would one of those clusters of cells stick around? Would both? Finally, a day before the fertility appointment where they’d test my blood for HCG (the hormone that appears during early pregnancy), I took a home test and the plus sign turned pink within seconds. It was the only time in my life that I’d gotten a positive result from one of those tests (though I’d self administered many with a great deal of hope).

I don’t know how long late November and early December will bring me back to the fertility treatments that brought me my boys, but at the moment, I can’t live through this time of year without remembering and feeling that balloon of desperate hope and anticipation.