I’ve been on a photo organizing kick lately. I was looking through photo albums and realized that I hadn’t updated them in about a year. I had gotten all caught up with creating Web albums, putting pix on iPhoto, posting Facebook albums and sending digital pictures to people via email, that I forgot about the old fashioned photographs in the old fashioned book. And these will be important when the power goes out and we have nothing to do that isn’t plugged in. The longer I live in Florida the greater my chances are of finding myself at home rooting around the cabinets with a flashlight looking for something to entertain me while I wait for all the food in my freezer to thaw.
So I was looking back in some old albums and – – oh my god, what were we thinking when we got married and had a baby? According to the photo evidence I have, I was only 15-years-old when I had him, and my husband was no older than 11. Why has there not been a Lifetime movie about the two of us getting married and having a baby with the consent of our mothers? (When it happens, I want the red haired girl from That ‘70s Show to play me.)
Neither one of us had enough sense to get a decent pair of glasses, so who did we think we were? In the background of the pictures of me bringing the baby home from the hospital, there is a Picasso “Hands With Bouquet” poster that I think I had in my college dorm room.
If it turns out that our son turns out bad (and the jury is still out until he’s 40. So far so good, but he’s got 18 years to go before we know for sure) it will certainly be because he was born to a pair of pre-teen nitwits.
Despite being immature, my husband and I were good parents. I was relatively clean when our kids were babies. I even boiled bottles (although here’s a tip – don’t boil a thermometer). I can count on one hand the number of times we accidentally gave one of the kids a sippy cup of margaritas thinking it was lemonade. Only once did my mother-in-law have to yell at us for playing poker at 2 a.m. and being so loud that she and the baby – our baby – couldn’t sleep. And only twice did we give the kids Pop Tarts for dinner two nights in a row during a Baby Fest weekend with the Coys and the Williamses.
But that was a long, long time ago. We’ve matured since then, our houses are decorated way more grown up now. Plus, we can’t stay up late enough to play loud poker to keep the kids awake. It’s nice how life works out that way.