Our Friends Are Starting to Have Babies
Logan is traveling for a wedding right now, so I thought I’d chat with Adam (who covers movies here) about this time in our life when our friends are starting to have children.
Adam: We both made a great new friend last night.
Mike: The tiniest friend!
Adam: I have never seen a baby that small! I mean I have, but not so up close. And not as a grownup.
Mike: The baby was just over five pounds when she was born. Adam, do you know what you weighed when you were born?
Adam: What? Why would I know that. What kind of person knows that. Wait do YOU know???
Mike: Uh, YES. That was something I immediately wanted to know once I knew that babies were weighed when they’re born. I was 7 pounds, 2 ounces.
Adam: So you were normal sized. And you are still normal sized. A significant correlation?????? Does baby size predict adult size? IF ONLY THERE WAS ANY WAY TO KNOW. Anyway. Can we talk about how I was called out for staring at the baby while I held her?
Mike: We were all staring at the baby! Though, true, there was a moment when we stared at you while you were staring at the baby. It was all very sweet. We’re in this phase of our life right now where everyone we know is starting to get married and have children, or deciding that they don’t want to get married or have children.
Adam: 1) I was afraid that if I stopped looking at her I would forget I was holding her because she has no mass, so I was not being sweet I was being SMART. And 2) Yes that is true. What is your wedding count so far this year?
Mike: 1) Yes, it was sweet, and 2) six, and next month will make it seven. What’s your count for the year?
Adam: 6 and I think I am done for 2012.
Mike: So, I actually created a wedding fund to make sure that I could afford to go to all these weddings. Is that what you did?
Adam: Nope. I did what you might call “not doing that.”
Mike: Haha. Well, I’m guessing that most people do what you do! Okay, I don’t want to think about weddings anymore. Let’s talk some more about this baby. When the baby was born, we got sent a schedule and were told to sign up for specific dates to visit the baby, which I thought was super smart.
Adam: This was a genius idea, yeah. Big ups to Doodle.com. How did you ever even see a baby before email and Doodle.com? (That’s their slogan by the way.)
Mike: Right! Because when you are one of the first of your friends to have a baby, everyone wants to come over to look at the tiny human you produced, and I’m sure it can be a nightmare having to field phone calls and answer e-mails to tell people when they can come over.
This made things so much easier, and I liked that the idea was if you were coming to visit, you also brought the parents food, because who has time to cook when you’re spending all your time staring at a tiny baby?
Adam: Any system that makes it easy for me to do a nice thing for another person without having to do any of the hard thinking or planning is great and very welcome.
Mike: This was my first friend in this city to have a baby. Do you have other friends with babies in the city?
Adam: I do know other people who have babies in the city, but this is basically my first too. Like it’s been, “oh cool, so-and-so made a baby, rad.” But this was more “WHEN DO I GET TO SEE HER?”
I also have baby friends in other parts of the county. Where the barriers to successful babydom are sort of lower.
Mike: Yeah, the cost of living here is so high. It’s like, I’m barely paying my way here, how can I pay for another human being! But people find a way to do it. My parents raised three kids on practically nothing. Also, we kept saying how awesome this baby was going to have it because her parents are just so cool.
I’m sure this kid is going to LOVE having me and you around, too, reminding her how tiny she is.
Adam: Haha. I think I commented more than once last night on how lucky she is that her parents will always have good music playing in the house. It may have come off as condescending but I meant it with all my heart.
Mike: Yes! What kind of music did your parents play around the house when you were a kid? Mine did a lot of ballroom dancing, so we always had music to accompany the Tango or Rhumba or Foxtrot or Paso Doble, which I guess is sort of a cool origin story to have, but it also meant I didn’t know who The Beatles were until high school. (But I did a mean waltz as a third-grader!)
Adam: For me it was James Taylor, Peter Paul and Mary, and also a lot of Jewish music.
Mike: Well, hey: James Taylor!
Adam: Yes! But as a result I grew to hate James Taylor and only decided I liked him again later in life. Also I think I assumed he was Jewish.
Mike: I forgot that my cousin bought and gave me my first CD when I was in the sixth grade. It was Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” which was AWESOME. That’s one thing I’m looking forward to doing with all these friends who are having children now: Introducing them to stuff I love. What do you buy for a baby? What do you buy for a kid? There are so many cool things kids should know about!
Adam: I am very scared that the next generation is going to hate all the things we love.
Mike: Oh, they will, because kids like to rebel against whatever their parents like, but then they learn to appreciate it. Like you and James Taylor.
Adam: True. Or like my grandkids and Skrillex. They’ll come around.
my dad was born really fat (and blonde) and his cousin was born really tiny (don’t know about hair color) and they both grew opposite-ly until my dad was a skinny (brown-haired) kid and his cousin was fat kid. my dad is still skinny and his cousin is still husky.
i think length has more correlation to projected height, though.
My brothers are twins and combined weighed more than 18 pounds, rendering them, in 1985 at least, the largest set of twins ever born at that hospital. Today they are both about 6’5″ and are built similarly to the average NFL quarterback. I was a bit over nine pounds myself, and stand about 5’11″ now. So, anecdata, but in our cases birth weight and height definitely correlated.
@hellonheels My exboyfriend is 6’6 and was normal sized when he was born, but apparently he had enormous hands and feet. You know, like a puppy.
No! I was like 9 pounds and 11 inches! And I am a completely tiny 5’3.5 inch human now. So no correlation.
Also: this girl I grew up with was born two days before me, and was like a 5 pounder. She grew up to be pretty broad shouldered and around 5’11. So there.
I have zero idea how much I weighed when I was born. I DO know I was born at like 7:15pm though, and I was the only one of my siblings right on schedule.
Also I love that Mike Dang’s first CD was a Janet Jackson CD. I’m not sure what mine was proooobbbably something like N*SYNC. Or a Disney soundtrack.
@Megano! My first CD was definitely the backstreet boys. PRETTY SURE it was their first album. <– early adopter right here
I likewise have no idea how much I weighed as a baby. Is that thing people want to know? Also Mike Dang, we are tied for number of weddings in 2012. I challenge you to a rematch in 2013! For the sake of my wallet I really hope you win.
1) I weighed 6 pounds 11 ounces, I think.
2) I grew up on Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, and lots of Motown in addition to the rock. Plus some classical for kicks.
3)I only had one wedding to go to this year. Most of my friends are already married, gaywads, and/or just kinda late bloomers (not unlike myself).
9.5 lbs and the largest of the pack (thus why I know how much I weighed). I turned out pretty average sized.
HOW DO PEOPLE NOT KNOW THIS?
I was 8 lb 8 oz, born at 6:04 pm.
My younger brother (who is now 6’8″, BY THE WAY) was 10 lb 10 oz. Huge baby! He was born at 7:11 pm.
@Lauren Seriously! He was a 10 and a half pound baby!!!
@Lauren I feel so bad for your mum…
@Lauren My brother was ten pounds and change! HE GOT STUCK.
@Lauren 10lb 10oz is for sure the most appropriate weight for awesome babies.
I was born 1 lb 14 oz (yay being born three months early!) and am now 5′ 10″ and about 152 lbs (and am male, so that’s around average height for the US). So in my case, no real correlation. Although being born so early might be extenuating circumstances.
Also my sister just had a baby and it’s the first baby I’m not completely terrified of. Just mostly terrified. I’m excited for him to get older though, so I can give him rad fantasy and sci-fi books and hopefully teach him to play D&D. I will be the dorkiest uncle.
I was 10lbs 10oz, I was both breech and backwards (which is to see, ass up, feet first), and I was so scrunched up from having spent all that time in the clamshell position that there is no record of baby length, because I would spring back every time they stretched me out.
My big problem is that my wingspan is 6′ and my height is 5’6. When is second puberty going to start?!
we went kind of baby clothing shopping the other day and I was truly shocked/appalled at how gendered the clothing is. In this case the parents hadn’t revealed the sex of the baby and wow, the store we went into had absolutely nothing gender neutral that I could see. (the children’s place, ftr, I’m guessing different stores do it differently).
I basically grew up on the beach boys and quirks and quarks, and I took in none of the quirks or quarks. But I do wish I all could be california girls.
I was 8 lbs 12 oz, born at 7:56 AM on a Monday morning. (And the date of my mother’s first sonogram was April 18, and we spent six days in the hospital after I was born, and my Apgar scores were 8 and 9 (I am pretty quiet and obliging and didn’t mind when they scratched my foot), and two weeks after I was born my mother was 15 lbs under the weight she was when I was conceived on 12/24. We are kind of a numbers-oriented family, all of us, so of course I know all of these things.)
I babysat for my friends for the first time today! Their son was two months old on Thursday. I was not present for his birth but have tried to spend as much time as possible with him (without being rude to the parents) since then. He is the first baby I have actually been close to, though I have other friends with kids. It’s kind of magical. I thought that hanging out with him would make me either want or desperately not want kids, but really, he just makes me want to hang out with him. My friends make having kids look doable, but really only with this kid, and I would get a different kid, and I have zero idea how I feel about that (or how I’d feel about suddenly being 50 with no kids). So no decisions yet!
I do not know how much he weighed when he was born because his parents are not at all numbers people (they asked me on their anniversary a few weeks ago how many years they’d been married – even though I didn’t even know them when they got married – because they figured I’d remember what year it happened even if they didn’t).