So it happened. I have a new granddaughter. Her name is Mabel. I’m lying, of course. It’s not actually Mabel, but her real name is none of your business. No offense.
I don’t know why I bother to protect my family’s identities with pseudonyms, considering that most kids these days overshare every second of their lives on social media.
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Let’s just say that my beautiful newborn girl is the most perfect baby who ever lived. She looks remarkably like a Cabbage Patch Kid.
And she came into the world as a bit of a surprise.
You may remember that my 25-year-old daughter, Curly Girl, was past her due date and quite anxious to get that freeloading baby out of her, because she had the unfortunate tendency to kick her innards constantly.
This made it difficult to sleep. I’m personally unfamiliar with this experience, since both of my kids were adopted from the foster system, and, hence, came premanufactured. I’m not saying they never kicked me, but it was never from the inside.
Curly Girl had finally taken maternity leave from her job running a dive bar and was just hanging around her apartment for maybe two weeks, feeling like she had an entire human being the size of a T-Rex crammed uncomfortably into her abdomen. She went into early labor but then just stalled there, miserable.
She managed to make it through Thanksgiving dinner without giving birth in the middle of it — which made me happy because I wanted to eat turkey — but she couldn’t eat anything because there was just no room left in there.
On Saturday night, I persuaded her to come to the Winter Fest OC with me at the Orange County Fairgrounds. It was a fun night and, thankfully, not too cold. She brought baby Floyd, who’s now 19 months, and we walked around and ate a lot of really unhealthy fair food and took pictures of all the pretty light displays.
In the latter part of her pregnancy, she was craving chili cheese dogs, which is something she never would have eaten before. On Friday night, her craving was so intense that I ordered one for her from Wienerschnitzel and had it delivered by Uber Eats. So the $4 hot dog actually cost $15.68.
Luckily for her, they had chili cheese dogs for sale at the Winter Fest, although they cost as much as filet mignon. But that’s fair food for you, right?
Considering her tummy was the size of a grand prize pumpkin, Curly Girl didn’t feel much like ice skating, or going down the giant slide or riding on any carnival rides, although I was pretty sure that a couple of the more scary looking ones would have shot that baby right out of her. Unfortunately, she wasn’t in favor of giving birth at the fairgrounds, even though it probably would have been quite an exciting news event. Clearly, she doesn’t get the concept of being a journalist’s daughter.
While we were there, she told me she was going to try this so-called Midwives Brew that had been recommended by her birth doula. She’d already unsuccessfully tried special exercises and eating dates. The Midwives Brew consists of castor oil, lemon verbena tea, apricot juice and almond butter. After she got home, she mixed it up and said she managed to choke it down, even though it was nasty.
She went into hard labor two hours later. She called me at 4 a.m. to say she was at the hospital. Her best friend was supposed to come up to Riverside and be in the delivery room with her — something she’d begged to do for months.
I asked her if I should come up and she said that I should just wait for an update. So I waited. And fell back asleep. Don’t judge me. I’m old.
At 5:20, she called to say that the baby had been born, and everything went so quickly that no one even had time to get there. Her friend who was supposed to come had accidentally fallen back asleep. When I heard that, of course, I felt guilty that I wasn’t there, but the husband was and everything went perfectly and astonishingly fast. So fast that the pain meds didn’t even have time to take effect, so she essentially had a natural childbirth, by accident.
Of course I went up to see this new gift from the universe, and she absolutely is the perfect girl. And even happier to say that her older baby brother, Floyd, loves her, gives her kisses and likes to cuddle with her. They’d prepared him well for this moment.
So that’s all the news this week from Lake Woebegon. Stay tuned for next week and more tales of unhealthy food.
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Frumpy Mom: Oh, no. I have another boy to raise.
Frumpy Mom: I was actually allowed to hold the baby