Twas Brillig

All right, Gentle Readers, we’ve all had a great time discussing double standards and over/under generalizing and sometimes agreeing, but mostly disagreeing. It’s been a raging party here at Twas Brillig. Thanks for all of your comments. While there were some vehement disagreements, I think in the end we all still like each other. At least, I still like all of you!

So, good crap. Let’s not talk about it anymore. (Okay, if you must, you’re welcome to continue the conversation below… I just mean that I won’t be POSTING about it anymore.)

Moving on…

I’m the youngest child in my family. I have three older sisters and two older brothers. My siblings are good people and I admire them all. (Though, of course, only ONE of them actually has the link to this blog. The others are blissfully unaware of its existence!)

Being the youngest had its perks. I got to travel a lot more than some of my siblings did, and by the time I was a teenager my parents had real money, instead of doing that “barely scraping by” thing that they’d done with my siblings. My parents began spoiling themselves, and I suppose I was “spoiled” (according to my siblings) somewhere along the way.

Of course, it also had its downfalls. My oldest siblings were each given cars as teenagers. Thanks to their total recklessness and irresponsibility, I wasn’t even allowed to touch the family cars. Plus, all those years of being alone with good ol’ mom and dad after my siblings had left home were… tricky. What my siblings call “spoiled” I would call something more like demanded, scrutinized, attacked, and constantly berated for not being quite perfect enough… There was no one to distract them from the magnifying glass they had centered right above me–and it was frying me alive.

The other big downfall of being the youngest, of course, is that by the time you come along, your parents are bored with taking pictures. You can kind of understand this. I mean, I was the fourth daughter, sixth child. They’d wasted all their film on my oldest siblings. When I came along, I was nothing new. So while there are hundreds, nay, THOUSANDS of pictures of my sister Laura, I can’t seem to find any of me.

Too bad, cuz I bet I was one gorgeous baby. I weep for a world that doesn’t have pictures of me readily available.

So, how can I make it up to the universe? Well, I can start by not repeating the sins of the fathers. And so, I present to you MY youngest–who from this day forward, I solemnly vow to feature prominently in photographs!

Here he is–my 10-month-old Fuzzles, helping me with the dishes last night. SUCH a helper…

He looks a lot more like his dad than like me–they all do. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find any of me in any of them. (And yet, I distinctly remember squeezing them forth from my loins.) I’m okay with that, though. I mean, their dad’s hot, so how lucky for the kids that they all look like him!

Other memorable photos of Fuzzles include this one, where he was having his chest x-rayed when he was hospitalized for RSV. Have you ever seen how they do x-rays on teeny babies? They shoved him into a little tiny plastic tube and strapped his arms straight up. Let’s just say that he wasn’t thrilled with this arrangement. Brace yourselves…

He had a pretty nasty case of RSV and was in the hospital for a week. Here he is towards the end of his stay (clearly the end, because he’s no longer attached to IV’s and oxygen tanks and monitors–I have pictures of that stuff too, but it’s still a bit too horrifying to me) in his hospital gown. I still can’t get over his little baby hospital gown!

Obviously we can’t forget his first Halloween, right? He wasn’t quite 2 months old at this point.

And, okay. Just one more. Here he is when I was setting him up to be the new monarch of the family (as explained here). He’d really make a lovely monarch, don’t you think?

And there he is, Gentle Readers. The most gorgeous baby that ever crawled the planet. And I can say that because, naturally, I’m completely unbiased.

Now, of course, I won’t be ignoring the other kids. But I can’t feature them all today–I mean, the brain can only process so much gorgeousness before it becomes overwhelmed and begins causing twitching and seizures.

Really, I’m only looking out for your well-being, Gentle Readers.