Installment 5 of our story: It was quite the change in life having a new baby to take care of. Kathy and I became increasingly self-centered and tried to control each other as time went on. We would fight quite frequently over the stupidest things. Each of us always had to be right. I was the quiet one who would sit back and push Kathy’s buttons, and I knew which ones to push. Kathy on the other hand had quite the temper and it would almost inevitably end up her throwing something at me. I was quite a tease and not a good thing. We kept looking to each other to make the other happy and we were both quite the victims of each other. Thus began the problems in our marriage. Kathy was much more liberal in her approach to the church and raising our children than me. I was much more conservative and controlling and we argued constantly about these differences. My Mom, Linda, had come out after Justin had been born. She was there for a couple weeks or so to help Kathy and I adjust to the new baby and let Kathy rest and get her energy up. We had placed the placenta in the fridge until we could figure out how to dispose of it. My Mom had opened the fridge and was standing there holding the placenta wondering what this food was. I told her we were going to have placenta pizza for dinner that night. When she realized that was what it was she screamed. I did finally tell her I was joking. Things were getting much more stressful with Justin in our lives. Kathy decided to breast feed him which made my life a little easier in the beginning. I would be the one to get up and get him for the late feedings while Kathy fed him. I did share in changing the diapers, even the poopy ones. Our first time bringing Justin to church brought many comments from parishioners. Everybody commented on Justin’s bright red hair. Kathy is of Irish descent and had an uncle and a grandfather nicknamed brick for the color of their hair. Obviously Justin got this trait. My hair is dark brown and Kathy is more of dishwater blonde. I told everyone that our mailman had red hair. That afternoon as we were pulling into our driveway, the mailman was walking toward us and he had bright red hair. I looked at Kathy with surprise and she immediately said she hadn’t seen this mailman before. He started waiving at her with vigor. Poor Justin never got to know his real dad. Too funny as it was a fill in mailman for our regular guy was on vacation, I think. Justin was gaining weight fast and was turning into a little pudge. He had more chins than a Chinese phone book. This concerned me as we were going to have a fat child. One day when we finally decided to get out on a date and leave Justin to be babysat, Kathy had pumped some milk for the babysitter to feed to Justin. Her milk was half cream. That explained his baby fat. He ended up losing it after he became more active and spent his youth looking like a starving kid. Justin was such a good baby. He would listen to whatever you told him, when he was young. When he was able to pull himself up onto things and would try to touch something, I would say “don’t touch Justin” and his hands would fly in the air. We were God’s gift to child rearing if you asked us. Even if you didn’t ask us, we would tell you anyway. There were many occasions I know we offended many young parents. Their children would be acting up and of course Justin was so good. We would go to these young parents and tell them we were more than happy to share or wondrous parenting skills with them, so that they may have as good of a child as us. Nobody seemed to want to take us up on this.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 22:45:07 +0000
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