Memories of When My Babies Were Babies

This is in response to the StoryWorth question: What are your favorite memories of each of your children growing up?


Roxanna was my first child and she was a great first child as she was an easy child even though her birth was a bit of a dramedy.
My husband’s friend Ahmad was coming from Germany to visit us a couple weeks before Roxanna was due. At that time, we didn’t know if she would be a boy or a girl. My husband Mohammad wanted to fly to New York to meet Ahmad when he landed, stay a day or so in New York and then fly back to Nashville with him. Mohammad was worried that it was so close to my due date though and was kind of reluctant to do so. I nonchalantly waved aside his reservations and assured him that she wasn’t due for several days. I told him that if she did come early, she would likely come on the full moon of the 21st and he would be home by then. Even if she did come early, I could call him and he could immediately fly back so he shouldn’t worry.
So, off to New York he flew. I continued to go to work as a physical therapist in the hospital.
On Monday after work, I stopped by Kroger to pick up a few groceries and to get a carton of Mayfield chocolate chip ice cream. I really wanted some Mayfield chocolate chip ice cream, and that was not a pregnancy craving. I will never turn down Mayfield chocolate chip ice cream!
This was back in the day when the baggers would push the cart out to the car and put your groceries in your vehicle for you. As we were leaving the store, I felt wetness spread across my britches as my water broke. So I was walking out to the car with this young man behind me pushing my cart and I think, “Oh my goodness, this poor boy is going to think that I peed my britches; how embarrassing!”
Fortunately, I had a very large purse with a very long shoulder strap and I threw that baby behind me to cover my “peed-in-looking” britches. Hopefully, he never knew what happened. Of course, he may have thought, “That lady needs to pull a diaper out of her diaper bag because her diaper is way past changing!”
So anyway, I drove home and put up my groceries. I began to wonder if I should go to the hospital yet. I mean, my water had broken, but I was feeling no contractions at all. I mean, in the movies, they always wait until their contractions are so far apart before they go to the hospital and I was having no contractions. What should I do?
So, I called the person who knows how to deal with any situation. I called Mom! She told me that I needed to go on to the hospital but that I should call my doctor’s office to make sure. So I called the doctor and I was told to go to the hospital.
I called Mohammad before leaving to tell him that I was going to the hospital. Now, I worked in the hospital and when I told him that I was going to the hospital, jet lag must have kept him from recognizing why I was going to the hospital. Even though it was after my working hours, he thought that I was just going in for something for work. Mohammad answered something like, “You’re going to the hospital, have a good day.” And I said, “No, I’m not going in to work; I am going in to have this baby.”
Well, I told him that I had to go and he said that he would get airplane tickets for him and Ahmad and be home asap.
So, without even stopping for a bowl of Mayfield chocolate chip ice cream, I took my bag out to the car and drove to the hospital. There, the nurses hooked me up to monitors and hooked the baby up to monitors…and we waited. They would tell me that I was having a contraction and I would tell them that I couldn’t feel it. They assured me that I would be feeling the contractions soon. I asked them what a contraction should feel like and they told me that it was similar to what cramps feel like when you’re on your period. When I asked them what cramps felt like, I think that they briefly considered smothering me with a pillow.
Well, I knew that I wanted an epidural. I won’t have a tooth filled without Novocain and I wasn’t about to be “unfilled” without an epidural. I knew from watching movies that the nurses were right and those contractions would get very noticeable. The nurses told me that I shouldn’t get the epidural until the contractions were pretty strong but that I shouldn’t wait until they got too bad because it could be too late for an epidural by that point.
So, at some point I got the epidural. I guess after I told the nurse. “I think that I felt that one!” and the nurse after looking at the little graph told me that I had for sure felt that one.
I remember the anesthetist telling me that I was just getting an epidural so I would still be able to move my legs, but I would be numbed. He went on to tell me that if I were having surgery, the anesthesia would numb me and keep me from moving.
So, I waited. In the meantime, I didn’t know what Mohammad had been able to arrange, but my parents had driven to the hospital from Wartrace. They were going to be in the delivery room if possible. Roxanna was taking her own sweet time to arrive. Mom worked at the same hospital as a nurse and had to leave when it was time for her shift. She came back later on her break. Dad stayed and Roxanna would at least be welcomed by Papaw.
We waited and waited. The nurses, the doctor, the anesthetist were monitoring me and the baby. At some point, an oxygen mask was put on me. I guess that the baby needed plenty of oxygen for what lay ahead.
It seems that the baby had had second thoughts after partially descending. She seemed to balk right there in the middle of the birth canal and when she couldn’t return to her womb, she got pretty stressed out. The doctor told me that the baby was getting too stressed and that I needed a Cesarean. The anesthetist told me that he was giving me more medicine. In the meantime, Dad decided that he really didn’t want to be in the delivery room while HIS baby was being sliced into.
So I was wheeled into the room for the C-section. My arms were taped to two side pieces that extended out from the gurney. My oxygen mask kept crawling up my face like drawers crawling up a crack. The anesthetist was at my head and I asked if I couldn’t have at least one arm free to keep my mask down. He assured me that he would keep an eye on it and pull it down for me. Since Dad wasn’t with me, he said that he could take photos for me too so we had handed our camera over to him.
Now, before they had me draped and the curtain up between my line of vision and any slicing going on, I noticed that I was able to move my toes. I told the anesthetist that I was having surgery and I didn’t think that I was supposed to be able to move my toes if I was having surgery. He assured me that this was okay. I began to wonder if anesthetizing, oxygen mask adjusting and birth photographing might be spreading his multi-tasking skills a might too thin. After the curtain was up to keep me from seeing what was going on…I would have likely passed out cold, I asked the anesthetist if he was sure that he had given me enough medicine because I could feel them doing something. He asked me what I felt them doing and I told him that it felt like they were pressing the handle of a butter knife onto my abdomen and pulling it across. He assured me that I was okay because they were doing more than that.
They had given me some other medicine in my IV that played a bit with my head. When I looked up at the ceiling, it looked like a bunch of dots in shades of tans and browns were circling like they were going down a drain.
Well, after Roxanna popped out of my incision, they wiped her off a bit and then brought her up past the curtain so that I could see her. I remember turning my head to the right to see her. She had a kind of pointy head, maybe from being stuck in the birth canal, and fuzzy cheeks, and I thought, “Wow, who would have known that a little conehead baby Elvis could be SO BEAUTIFUL?!”

 

                                                        

Mohammad would make it to the hospital after her birth. Mom tells me that she remembers standing outside the nursery window with Mohammad looking in at all of the beautiful babies. Mohammad said to her, “I might be prejudiced, but I think that she is the prettiest baby in there.” We often use that expression now, “I might be prejudiced but…”
Roxanna’s birth has opened my eyes to the fact that getting a spur-of-the-moment plane ticket is not near as easy as I thought it would be. The way Ahmad and Mohammad talked, they had to get a tiny plane, likely smaller than a Tennessee mosquito, to fly home. They were white-knuckled the entire flight except for the times when they had to flap their arms like wings to keep the plane aloft!
So those are some sweet memories about Roxanna’s birth. I suppose that some folks might not understand how they could be sweet but when I remember that time, I have to smile and that means sweet memories to me.
Now I often tell folks that Roxanna popped out of the womb and introduced herself to the doctor before she had a chance to be passed up to say hello to me. That is a wee bit of an exaggeration but it is hard to recall a time when Roxanna wasn’t talking. She has always been my talker and my songbird. Talking and singing constantly and I smile remembering those days.
Roxanna had colic for about three months. I could not do anything that would comfort her when she had colic. I would try to nurse her and she cried. I would rock her and she cried. I would stand on my head and make googly eyes and she cried…well that is a slight exaggeration, but nothing could comfort her. Then, she just stopped crying every night. It was like I had found a switch and flipped it off. It was amazing!
After the time of colic, Roxanna was the perfect baby. Mom and Dad would come to visit us and could go to her crib to see her and she would wake up. She wouldn’t wake up grumpy; she would wake up with a smile on her face.
Roxanna didn’t really learn to crawl like most babies. She would roll to wherever she wanted to go. She was a tough little thing too. I remember when she was just a baby getting her immunizations. The nurse put one shot in her arm and Roxanna just looked confused. She gave her another shot in the same arm and Roxanna started getting a bit aggravated. After the nurse gave her a third shot in her other arm, she began to cry. I guess she thought that if she didn’t speak up, they would make a pincushion of her. I remember once when she was a toddler, she fell and banged her head hard against the edge of the coffee table. Before I was even able to stand up to see if she was okay, she popped up and said, “Don’t worry; I’m okay Mommy! I’m okay!”
Roxanna was very good at minding too. If she kept doing something she wasn’t supposed to, I just had to start counting to three and she would immediately stop. I don’t know what she thought would happen if she didn’t stop by three, but whatever it was, she did not want it to happen!
For some reason, Roxanna was mesmerized by the Doublemint chewing gum commercial. She could be in another room and if she heard that commercial on the TV, she would come running and stand right in front of the TV swaying with the music until it was over. She also loved Dolly Parton who she called Dolly Partment. Whenever we saw Dolly on the cover of the gossip sheets at the grocery checkout, she would excitedly exclaim, “Dolly Partment, Mommy! Dolly Partment!”
One evening a Dolly Parton Christmas special was on TV. When it was about halfway over, we wanted to go out to eat. Roxanna cried and didn’t want to go until Dolly Partment was finished. We convinced her to go when her daddy told her that we could tape the rest of the show and she could watch it when we got home. So, Mohammad popped a tape in the VCR and we went out to eat.
Well, when we got home, we had to watch the final half of the Dolly Partment special. We saw the final half of that Dolly Partment special multiple times a day for months on end. We watched the Dolly Partment Christmas special in January, in February we heard Dolly singing Christmas songs, in March… We had a Dolly Partment Christmas in July. Then one day, we could not find the tape. We looked everywhere but it was nowhere to be found. I don’t recall Roxanna crying inconsolably for hours so perhaps she had had her Dolly Partment fill. Later, Mohammad would embarrassingly tell me that he had done something bad. He loves Dolly but he told me that he just had not been able to take Dolly anymore and had hidden the tape. Sometime later, after we had had a Dolly break, and perhaps closer to Christmas, we found the tape again. Thankfully, Roxanna did not have to watch it 24/7 by then.
After Roxanna was born, we bought our first home and moved. Not long after that, Mom and Dad bought a house just a couple miles away from our house. We all got to spend more time together and Roxanna would go spend the night with them on the weekend. Mom tells me that once when they were out running errands, they were driving by our road on their way home and Roxanna bemoaned, “ but I don’t wanna go to 579 Deerfield Drive!” Now whenever I am running errands with Mom and we pass by Deerfield Drive we will laugh and say, “But I don’t wanna go back to 579 Deerfield Drive!”
Mom and Dad’s neighbors had a Jack Russell terrier named Rocky that often ran loose in the neighborhood. Whenever Roxanna would spend the night with them, she would go out on the deck and bark until Rocky came to be petted.




                                                  

One day, Roxanna got perturbed with her Papaw. She began reciting a list of all of the folks she loved best and in the order she loved them. “I love Grandma. I love Mommy. I love Daddy… Finally, I love Rocky. I love Papaw.” We still joke that if Papaw misbehaves, he just might not rate as well as the neighbor’s dog!



Roxanna loved spending the night with Grandma and Papaw. Mom would often make grilled cheese sandwiches for her and she always wanted pickled okra to eat with her sandwich. One time Roxanna was digging through the refrigerator. When Mom asked her what she was looking for, she told her she wanted the cobra. Mom told her that they didn’t have any cobra. Roxanna found the okra, pulled it out and told her, Yes you do Grandma! Here it is!” .  Still, we often call okra cobra and smile. Roxanna loved to help Grandma make biscuits too. Roxanna still makes biscuits for us when she comes to our house to visit.


                                       

Roxanna always had to bring something home with her from Grandma and Papaw’s when she came home. It just had to be something small and often it was just a can of peaches. We think that Roxanna was just trying to keep a bit of Grandma and Papaw with her even when she was home
I have one funny memory of a trip to K-mart with Roxanna. Roxanna has always had a head full of curls and I mean curls that could make Shirley Temple jealous. We had one brush that Mohammad had brought from Iran that I could brush her hair with. It was one of the wire bristled brushes. Well, that brush finally wore out and I bought a new one. Unfortunately, it pulled her hair so much that she would cry. I bought a different one with the same results. I looked closely at the brush and each of the wire bristles had a little round of plastic on the end of it and Roxanna’s hair was catching on that plastic tip. I searched and searched for a brush without the tips but I could not find one. Once when we were at K-mart. Somehow we ended up on the pet aisle and I happened to see a dog brush; the kind that has wire bristles on one side and nylon bristles on the other. The wire bristles didn’t have plastic tips! Could this brush work on Roxanna’s hair!? Roxanna was sitting in the kiddy seat in the cart and I said, “Let me see if this will work on your hair, Sweetie.” Sure enough, it worked! I told Roxanna that we had finally found her a new brush and I handed it to her to hold. A few minutes later, Roxanna asks me, “Mommy, why does my new brush have a picture of a puppy on it?” Well, of course, the answer was because puppies are cute just like she was!

 

                                               Roxanna with curls toward the camera.

So there are some of my fondest memories of Roxanna when she was young. Like I said, she was a perfect first child.
Next came Alexandria. I don’t have a delivery story for Alex. Except to say that I managed to not have to have a C-section with her. Somehow folks were surprised about that and thought that I would have gone ahead and scheduled to have a C-section. I thought they had to be nuts! Why on Earth would I volunteer for that pain. I may not have known a good contraction when I felt one, and I may not have known the pain of menstrual cramps, but I KNEW the pain of a C-section and I wasn’t about to volunteer to experience that again!
So I had Alex without any problems. She wasn’t a little conehead Elvis baby but she was still absolutely beautiful! She had dark, dark hair and a very pale complexion. My cousin Kookie used to call her Snow White.

 
 

                                               Mom and Mohammad admiring Alexandria

                                                        

Now, Alex was quite different from her sister Roxanna. Alex was into girly-girl things. She has always loved cute dresses, jewelry, nail polish… girly things. Roxanna was never into any of that. Alex was always into art and loved construction paper, markers, crayons, scissors. She could not get enough of them and she was always drawing, cutting out shapes from construction paper, coloring with crayons and markers. I don’t remember Roxanna ever making a mark on a wall. Alex’s art was on nearly every wall in the house.
Roxanna seemed to come out of the womb talking but Alex didn’t really start talking much until she was around three. I remember on a trip to Target, Alex saw a stuffed Barney and actually said Barney. Barney was kind of annoying to me, but I was so happy that she had uttered his name that I grabbed him off the shelf and told Alex that Barney was hers! I think that that may have been setting a bad precedent as it seemed that from then on, she was quite adept at asking for everything in the store!
Alex was just constantly making some kind of art. Once when it was bedtime, Alex was cutting out shapes from construction paper. I told her that she needed to put her art supplies up and go to bed. She looked at me and told me very seriously, ‘but I need to cut, Mommy”. I told her that she needed to go to bed and I finally got her in bed. The next morning, I noticed that her bangs had been cut in a very asymmetrical way. It seems that Alex had managed to take her scissors to bed and she must have really NEEDed to cut!
Alex also loved pretending to be a waitress. When it was close to mealtime, she would sometimes get a pad a pen and go around to take orders from people. I am not sure what everyone ordered but I know that in spite of a very limited menu, Alex seemed to get the right orders to the right customers in a timely way!




                                                        

Alex loved to pretend to be a teacher. She would arrange her stuffed animals and dolls around her like her class and read to them, sing with them, teach them. She always wanted to go to the parent-teacher store when we were near it. She would want to buy attendance and grade books for her students. She wanted a roll of tickets one time and when I asked why she wanted a roll of tickets, she patiently told me they were to reward her students. After her brother Cameron was born, he became one of her students and I learned that if he listened to his teacher Alex, he would be rewarded with tickets. When he got so many, he could exchange it for a prize from Alex’s goody bag.
After Alex was born, Roxanna and she would take turns spending the night with Grandma and Papaw on the weekend. They both loved to spend the night with them and would often argue about whose turn it was. We would often have to let Grandma and Papaw be the final judge in remembering. Alex loved to help Grandma make cookies for Papaw.




                                        

In spite of loving to spend the night with them, Alex did get upset with Papaw for some reason one time. She told Papaw that she was going to put him on a boat and put it in the river and that river was going to take that boat on out to the ocean! Fortunately, that didn’t last long. Now we kid Dad when he does something that we don't like by saying that we will put him in a boat on the river.
I remember a cute thing from Alex’s preschool days. She was telling me about all of her friends and one little boy seemed to be special to her. I asked him what his name was and she said, “His name is Charles, but I call him Charlsey Walsey.” We have mentioned Charlsey Walsey a few times over the years.
Alex was always my very literal child. She seemed to take you at your word. If you said it was raining cats and dogs, she would look outside and argue that it was most surely not raining cats and dogs! You had to watch your words with her.
Alex was a little firebrand at times. She could lose her temper and become quite upset! Fortunately, it didn’t take too awful long for her to calm down and be her sweet and loving self again.
Cameron was our third and last child. He was a sweet baby just like his older sisters. When he was young, his hair was almost a strawberry blonde. He had curls but his hair was not near as curly as Roxanna’s had been. He looked like a sweet little cherub.

 

                                                            Me cutting Cammy's cord.


                                                      

Cammy was my little climber. He climbed everything that he could. Once I even caught him on top of the dining room table. He had almost succeeded in literally swinging from the chandelier. Another time, I was sitting in the living room when I heard Cammy frantically calling, “Mommy, come here! Come here!” He wasn’t even it kindergarten yet when he did this. I hurried to his room to see what was wrong. There I found him with his blonde curls nearly touching the ceiling. He had straddled the doorframe and walked himself up to the top. When he got there, he must have looked down and gotten a little worried about how he was going to get back down. I got ahold of him and put him on the ground. Eventually, he figured out how to get down himself.




                                                   

                                                   

                                                        Climbing in the Pokies.


                                                   

                                              Cammy after a couple years of practice.

One of my fondest memories of Cammy is one that I share with Mom. I would go on Fridays to help clean Mom and Dad’s house. After we finished, Mom and I would go to eat at Logan’s. Dad never wanted to go out to eat and we would get carryout for him when we were ready to leave.
Now Logan’s had the peanuts in the shells on the table and they gave you rolls before your meal arrived. Cammy would stand on the bench seat beside me and eat peanuts and bread. They used to have a really nice salad with half of a boiled egg on it. Cammy would then eat the egg and tomatoes from our salads. Of course, by the time our meals arrived, Cammy would be pretty full of peanuts, bread, and eggs. I would kid him and tell him that I should have just made him a peanut butter sandwich. Mom will often remark to me that she will never forget Cammy standing on the bench at Logan’s with his little blonde curls eating peanuts, bread, eggs, and tomatoes!
Cammy was like Alex in that he started talking pretty late. Of course, when Roxanna is your first child, every child thereafter just about has to be a late talker. Cammy used to say poking instead of smoking. His daddy poked cigarettes. When we went to the mountains, we were in the Pokey Mountains, not the Smoky Mountains. He got a little stuffed bear from the mountains and named him Pokey.
Cammy has always loved to read. All three of my children loved to read. He loved the Magic School Bus books too. He and I both learned a lot from those Magic School House books. That may be how Alex knew that if she put Papaw into a boat on the river that he would eventually make it to the ocean!


                                       
                                                  Enjoying the new encyclopedias.


So Cammy and I read lots of animal books. He also had a pretend friend named Max that lived in Costa Rica. Cammy and one of his real little buddies had decided that when they grew up, they were going to go live in Costa Rica, and there they were going to study all of the interesting animals that lived there. I guess that Max had told him about all of the wildlife they had.
Cammy had a pretty good imagination and he used to tell me that he was from another planet. That planet was Bobnanna. So if Cammy does or says something strange, I imagine that it is his Bobnannian nature showing through.
I have another fond memory of Cammy’s childhood that involved a cheeseball that I would often make for Christmas Eve and other times when the family would get together. Cammy used to hate it and designated it as “the evil cheeseball”. He even made a little comic strip featuring the dastardly evil cheeseball villain!
So here are a few of my fond memories of my children’s childhoods. Roxanna was my talker and songbird. Alex was my little artist-teacher. Cammy was my little mountain goat zoologist. They were each such very sweet children and I am so glad that God let us share our journeys together. I loved them as babies and I love them as fiercely today as I ever have. I am so very proud of the beautiful, compassionate, and loving adults that they are today.