So, I was just thinking about some things the other night. I am going to be an aunt in about 5 months and when I got the news, I screamed into the phone. Babies make me excited, especially those that aren't mine. Oh, your baby started crying...you can have it back now.
There is also a new TV show on NBC called "The Baby Borrowers" where teenage couples are supposed to take care of babies for three days. After those exhaustive days, they must take care of toddlers, then 'tweeners, then teenagers, and then old people. It's an interesting concept and one that I think more teenagers need to experience before deciding to have a baby with their high school sweetheart while still in high school. I did not have a high school sweetheart, not by choice, I just wasn't that cute, but I did babysit and I'm Catholic so from both ends I knew that having a baby would ruin my life.
Fast forward ten years. I finally found someone who did think I was cute and decided to marry me a year ago. I wanted that beautiful, traditional Catholic wedding. In order to make that dream come true, we had many hoops to jump through. We met with a deacon of our church nearly 6 or 7 times. It was there we discussed the meaning of the vows, what things we found to be important in a marriage and of course our willingness to reproduce. This was half the reason why you get married in a Catholic church. I'm not quite sure what would happen if we said no to that option, but we said "Yes!" quickly, maybe a little too quickly.
In the next session, we had the most uncomfortable moment in all my existence. Our 75-year-old deacon was going into the delicate subject of sex and reproduction. He told us that there were a lot of people and media telling us to do weird things in our bedroom, but "doing it" the normal way with no accessories was going to produce the same result in conceiving. We sat there with vacuum tight filters (as my mom calls them). However, if we were sitting in a comic strip, a conjoined thought bubble would have formed over our heads. The Beavis and Butthead giggles followed by, "He said doing it." We nodded our heads, pretending we had never been exposed to such filth.
This set us up for another 6 sessions of something called "Natural Family Planning" or NFP as we called it. These sessions lasted 2 hours on Monday nights, as well as follow-up sessions with our teachers. I just couldn't understand why anyone would want to try this method when it takes nearly 12 hours to understand, well, kind of understand. It requires the WOMAN to take her temperature each day, the WOMAN to observe and document each time she pees, and the WOMAN to let the man know the 30 minute window as the primetime to conceive before 11 o'clock in the morning.
I've never been one to pay close attention to detail and it really bothered me that Casey was understanding it well and I was still stuck at the 3 spiked temperature marks.
"I don't get it," I would whisper to him during the whole 2 hours. He would roll his eyes, as if telling me that he knew the secret to conceiving with all of the rest of the women in the room. How did he figure it out? I despised him for understanding something that he didn't even have to understand; it was my job to let him know when it was time. I could barely read the digital thermometer; this was truly hopeless. Thank goodness there wasn't a test at the end and they still let us get married.
Perhaps this is just another way to weed out those of us who are not ready to have kids right away and remind us to enjoy these quiet years. It is rather nice to just have the two of us, a cat, and a soon-to-be niece or nephew to practice on. I think we just have to remember that it doesn't take weird things with lots of accessories to be good parents, just doing it the normal way will suffice...as in parenting styles...get your minds out of the gutter!
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