Every pregnant woman wishes she could control when she gives birth.  Perhaps you’re hoping your water won’t break at the U2 concert you really really want to attend.  Maybe your sister threatened to disown you if you upstaged her at her own wedding.  Or perhaps your OBGyn told you that you can’t schedule a c-section if you’re not pregnant yet.  But that won’t stop a girl from planning, and with some simple math and good ol’-fashioned team effort, you may find yourself having the Type-A childbirth of your dreams.

So when’s a good time to make this happen?

January

Some people actually try to birth the first baby of the new year.  It’s pretty exciting in a “local news report” sort of way, until your child realizes that the entire world will be too hungover to ever celebrate with them properly.

February

Having a baby during the coldest, snowiest month of the year gives you that perfect excuse to curl up with a bag of marshmallows and binge-watch Orange is the New Black.  I mean, bond with the baby.

March

Actually, March is a lovely time to give birth, what with it no longer pissing sleet every day, but not being a sauna yet. Just avoid giving birth on certain blackout dates, since your husband will never forgive you if you ruin St. Patrick’s Day for him.

April

If you want your child to be a tax write-off, they need to be born before January 1st, not April 15. You probably already knew that, but in case you didn’t, there you go.

Plus, it rains a lot in April.  This probably won’t affect your birth plan (unless you plan to give birth under a drain pipe), but all that rain certainly won’t soften the blow that your new bundle of joy will not bring you a tax refund.

May

There is something very fitting about giving birth around Mother’s Day.  That way, it gives you the perfect excuse to always make your child’s birthday all about you.

June

Finally, the weather is absolutely gorgeous…so you hear.  You’ve been stuck in the same spot on the couch for three days, the baby is asleep on your lap, and any sudden movement will destroy the balance of the Force.

July/August

No one will be around to celebrate your child’s birthday, which is just as well, because it’s too damn hot to plan a party anyway.

September

Labor Day signifies the end of hanging out, relaxation, being outside, and fun festivities.  Kind of a fitting time to have a baby, no?

October

Columbus Day nautical birthday parties!  Maternity ward Halloween costumes! Pumpkin patch photo shoots! Your Pinterest account will be worked into an orgasmic frenzy.

November

Your child will be one of the oldest/youngest kids in their grade, depending on whether you opt to hold them back a year/ enroll them in pre-K early.  They will then grow up taking kids’ lunch money/ Doogie Howser-ing their way through secondary school.  Either way, November babies won’t have to pay for college.

December

Having a birthday anywhere within throwing distance of the “holiday season” will royally screw your child for life.  They will blame you for their diminished bounty, emancipate themselves immediately, and to rub salt on the wound, forge their birth certificate to say they were born on St. Patrick’s Day.

Happy planning!

When I was ten years old, I was obsessed with watching reruns of the 1960s Batman series.  There was a particularly suspenseful episode that ended just as the Penguin tied up Batman and Robin and left them behind targets at a shooting gallery carnival game.  Would the caped crusaders escape and stop the Penguin’s dastardly plan?

No sleep for me.

I showed up the next day at the same Bat-time, same Bat-channel, but my mom was watching her stupid soap operas. She was unmoved by my concern for the Dynamic Duo, so I had to sit next to her and suffer through listless dialogue from a bunch of pretty adults, none of whom were wearing capes.

As an adult, I’m still terrible at handling suspense.  I read the endings of books first, look online for t.v. show spoilers, and force my friends to disclose any and all surprise parties that might be in my honor. Which is why having a baby is so stressful- there are TOO…MANY…UNKNOWNS, and I simply can not wait to find out how it all turns out.

For instance…

Am I pregnant?

Before even trying to conceive, I purchased a wide variety of pregnancy tests, just so that the minute that embryo split, I’d know.  After my 7th blue plus-sign, I decided to get confirmation from my doctor …but couldn’t get an appointment for three whole weeks.  THREE WEEKS? My head would’ve exploded.  Naturally, I switched doctors so that I could verify my status immediately.

Are YOU pregnant?

You’re not drinking. Why aren’t you drinking? You always drink. Is that a mimosa, or straight OJ? Why didn’t you order sushi with the rest of us? I’m sure there’s a reason why you’re waiting to share your news, but this will not stand.  I guess I’ll smile knowingly and make insinuations until you or your husband slip up.

What is the gender?

Yeah yeah yeah…everyone says some bullshit line like “Ooh, I don’t care what the gender is, as long as it’s healthy.”  Not me.  Learning my baby’s gender made that whole pregnancy business feel real, and I was twitching just thinking about it.   I tried to get my doctor to administer a blood test to find out the gender early, but he said it was “medically unnecessary” and “how did I get his home number?”  So we waited 20 intolerable weeks for the ultrasound. And then had to wait until the end of the exam, after feigning interest in femurs and head circumference, to finally see the money shot (Spoiler alert: Girl.  Both times).

Who will the baby resemble?  

When babies are born, they look like squishy mole people.  We all gush over him having his father’s eyes, or her mother’s lips, but babies change so quickly that there’s no way to know who they will end up looking like.  But I want to know NOW- will the baby have my flat feet, my grandmother’s rosacea, my husband’s 5 o’clock shadow?  But no, we have to wait and actually watch the kid develop.  Over time.  That’s like waiting for a Polaroid to develop…for eighteen years (sort of the anti-Instagram).

What will the baby be like?

“Will they paint rainbows, will they sing songs?” Que sera sera.

It would be nice to know if I’m going to have to shell out for dance lessons, or if a sports scholarship is in their future.  I’d also love a heads-up on any pre-teen sass that’s coming down the pike, or if I should look into a math tutor now (Are they hard to find?  Do I need to get on a wait list?  My baby is only a year old, but I really don’t want her to hate math).

My husband and I actually made Punet squares to narrow down our child’s genetic probabilities.  All we determined is that our kid has a 100% chance of being really dorky.

What’s that weird rash on her arm?

Yes, I know the doctor well-visit is in like, three days, but I’m concerned.  Is it small pox? Bug bites? Magic Marker? I. Need. To. Know. Immediately.  GoogleMD to the rescue!

Where are my car keys?

Um, this is important; I really need to find them. My infant better not have dropped them in the diaper genie again.  Seriously, kid, where are they? Otherwise we’re going to have to walk to the doctor.

Will my children be happy?

Okay, I have very little control over this one, but it’s the outcome that I pray for.   I definitely don’t want to fast-forward through life just to reveal key plot points in my children’s futures, but I’d feel much better knowing how it all turns out.  Any way to get a sneak preview?

Guess I’ll have to tune in tomorrow, same baby-time, same baby-channel.

The temperature has topped out at 85.   Your skin is slick from humidity, and the air tingles with the groans of lawn mowers and the squeals of neighborhood children, where you’re not quite sure if they’re playing or fighting.  Perhaps you’re in a city playground, watching your child sift cigarette butts out of the sandbox like a little nicotine gold miner. You might be at your son’s peewee baseball game, watching him pitch 25 times because the ump doesn’t count balls or strikes.  Or maybe you’re in your backyard, minding your own business and trying your best to teach your three year old the subtle nuances of corn hole.

No matter where you are, you hear it coming a mile away and are powerless to stop it.

The faint jangle of its music-box tune gets louder as it rounds the corner and slows to a crawl in front of wherever the masses are.   Like a pied piper, the tune lifts children off swings, out of dugouts, away from Disney Jr.  Entire playgrounds empty out; church mass tips over into an anticipatory frenzy; kids you didn’t even realize lived in your cul-de-sac spill into the street.

Your own kid abandons her bubbles and dashes over to the truck, dodging scooters and bicycles like Frogger crossing a four-lane highway.  You run interference, but there are no rules when it comes to the ice cream truck.

A growing cluster forms around the truck window, and there it is: Good Humour, Mr. Softee, or Tastee Freez, (which all sound like rejected Batman villains).  Your child is entranced by the pictures on the side of the truck:  eclairs, glistening sno-cones, a Spongebob pop with gumballs for eyes- GUMBALLS!  That is totally two treats in one!  Never mind that the pop itself tastes like frozen chalk.  You ponder trying something new, like a rainbow pushpop or a neopolitan ice cream sandwich…

“Are you gonna order, or what?” snaps a lady next to you, wrestling a writhing toddler.  Then she proceeds to place her own order.

“Hey, no cutting!” yells a woman behind you, holding the hands of two children whose faces already appear to be smeared with chocolate.  A shouting match ensues, flanked by opportunistic parents trying to sneak out a cone through the thick of it.  Your daughter clings to you in terror.

There appear to be two lines leading to the truck, and another argument breaks out as to which is the real line.  Elbows are raised, shoulders are dropped, a few stray kicks land.  Jostling through the melee, you manage to order two soft serve cones with rainbow sprinkles, and negotiate holding both of  them while removing correct change from your wallet buried deep in your back pocket.  Then you become the jerk who pays for a $3 cone with a 50 dollar bill (coated with sprinkles).

The vendor mentions that he’s down to the last rocket pop and the angry murmur escalates, even though rocket pops taste like patriotic syrup-sludge.  The last of the well-mannered children begin to lose their shit.  Civility is abandoned, and all social trappings are set aside.  Some older kids form primitive tools out of sporks and pretend to slash the truck’s tires.  One woman picks up her kid and uses him as a battering ram.  Two fathers grab the sides of the truck and try to overturn it in order to liberate the ice cream bars.  An elderly lady pokes her head out the window of her house and threatens to turn the hose on everyone (which you hope she does, since the air is as close to water as it can get without turning into an apocalyptic downpour).

And then, as quickly as it starts,  the dystopian chaos ends.  A zen calm overtakes the group.  Sated, everyone has their frozen treat, and plops down wherever they are to slurp it up before things get sloppy.  Your daughter doggedly consumes her cone from both ends before it leaks all over her new Doc McStuffins shirt.  As you pass her a wad of crumpled napkins, you smile and think: this is what it’s all about.

Sometime later that night, you think you hear the truck’s tune again.  But you look out the window and see nothing but unfettered lawn, a few scattered chipwich wrappers, a lone popsicle stick nudged into the grass.  And you return to your bed, knowing that today, cavities were created, dinners were spoiled, clothes were obliterated, and everyone went to sleep just a little bit happier.

9:00am: It is 95 degrees today, just like yesterday, and the day before that.  A perfect day to take my infant and toddler to the public pool.  Why haven’t we gone to the pool all summer?

9:05am: Try to stuff 12-month old into a swimsuit sized for 12-month-olds. Get one arm in before realizing the lycra will not stretch over baby chub.
9:10am: Try to pull baby out of too-small swimsuit.  Get her arm caught in multiple criss-crossing straps.
9:12am: Toddler prances in wearing what she refers to as her “swimming costume” (thanks, Peppa Pig). It consists of a pair of men’s boxers pulled from the laundry hamper, and sunglasses stretched over her chest (“like Ariel!”).
9:18am: Accidentally wedge both of baby’s legs into one swimsuit hole.  Pull whole thing off and start over.
9:22am: Hold baby between my knees while I use full body weight to yank up her bathing suit straps.
9:23am: Baby takes a massive dump.
9:29am: Try unsuccessfully to pull baby out of swimsuit without getting poop in her hair.
9:45am: Smear sunscreen over baby’s skin while she thrashes about like a mechanical bull. Get sunscreen on baby but have no time to rub it in because toddler is now climbing naked into stroller.

10:45am: Everyone dressed and ready.  Tote bag and diaper bag packed with essentials (towels, snacks, sunscreen, travel-sized bottle of Scotch).

11:30am: Arrive at pool. Spend another ten minutes re-applying sunscreen, donning hats, sunglasses, covering every bit of exposed flesh.

11:33am: Now cover up kids.

11:40am: Claim the last lounge chair in back of pool area.

11:41am: Understand why chair is unclaimed as we sit on it and immediately sink down to the concrete.

12:15pm: Attempt to coax toddler into pool; she inserts one finger and claims it’s too cold.  Remind her that it is 95 degrees out and cold water is a good thing.  She declares she will only go in pool if I allow her to wear floaties (even though the kiddie pool is only six inches deep).

12:40pm: Toddler claims that water got in her eyes (even though pool is only six inches deep and nowhere near her eyes).

Begins rubbing her eyes. Gets sunscreen in eyes. Cries pasty SPF 55 tears.

12:44pm: Distract toddler by pretending to be a Bubble Guppy.  Toddler looks ashamed of me and says “Mommy, Bubble Guppies live in the ocean.  This is a pool.”  I pretend to be a shark and eat all the Bubble Guppies.

12:50pm: Notice kids’ lips are turning purple.  Say it’s time to take a break from pool.  Both try to swim away from me: toddler trips and falls in the six inches of water, scrapes knee on bottom of pool.  Due to floaties, baby just kind bobs in a circle like a whiny buoy.

12:55pm: Drag two screaming, dripping kids back to broken lounge chair.  See diaper bag, but notice tote bag is not on lounge chair.

12:56pm: Remember that tote bag is still in car.  Have no towels, first-aid kit, etc.  Crap.

1:10pm: Use own t-shirt to dry off kids, remove swim boogers, stop bleeding on toddler’s knee.

1:20pm: Eat healthy pre-packed snack of cut grapes, wheat crackers, apple slices.

1:40pm: Purchase corn dogs and french fries from snack bar, since kids  (i.e. me) still seem hungry.

2:00pm: Venture into the bigger pool.  Inch in slowly (since the water is downright arctic).  Get drenched by some jerky tween doing a cannonball.

2:15pm: Notice that the water around us is turning a pale green.  Woman next to me moves her kids into the deeper end.

2:16pm: Lifeguard crouches next to us and politely asks if baby is wearing a swim pamper.  Guessing from the fact that diaper is swollen like Jiffy Pop, probably not.  Climb out of water in shame.

2:18pm: Diaper is now retaining more water than a PMS-ing sea sponge.  Explodes as I remove it, leaving bits of polyethylene fluff everywhere.

2:25pm: Toddler now needs to use the bathroom too. Carry her into public restroom so her feet won’t touch the sludge coating the floor. Smells heavily of chlorine, coconut, and Deet.

2:28pm: Peel off her wet bathing suit.  Hold daughter over toilet so she won’t make contact with it.  As my arms start to get shaky, she says she no longer has to go.

2:40pm: Finally get her back into her wet, rolled-up swimsuit.  Carry both children out of restroom.

2:55pm: Wrap children up in my soggy, bloodstained t-shirt and head back to car.  Pass woman entering with her three small children, each slick with sunscreen and Dorito crumbs, sprinting toward the deep end.  We nod at each other.

3:10pm: Note that we still have five hours to fill until bedtime.  Ask toddler what she’d like to do for the rest of the day.

“Can we go to the beach?”

Ask my 3-year old what’s going on in her life and you will get a full run-down.  She will tell anyone who will listen about visiting me in the hospital, holding her new baby brother for the first time, and how she helped come up with his name.  She can’t wait to go back to our beach house this summer to build sandcastles with her friend Emily.  Yesterday she ate two cheeseburgers at the Fun Zone.

And it will be so sweet and entertaining until you realize that it is 100% untrue.

Her “baby brother” is actually a sister, we have no beach house, and ‘Emily’ exists only in the recesses of her toddler brain.  Hell, we haven’t been to the Fun Zone in almost a year, and I’ll be tickled with a feather if I could get her to eat one cheeseburger, let alone two.

When a toddler becomes more verbal, we rejoice because the floodgates to communication are finally open.  But my daughter (like many small children) is an “Unreliable Narrator”: clear, sincere…and not to be trusted.

Here’s how to spot their fiction:

1.) They embellish for drama.

My daughter came home from a visit with the grandparents and reported that “Grandpa broke his leg.”  I immediately called my dad, only to learn that he bumped his knee on a table, and said “ow.”  That’s all.  Even my toddler recognized that this story needed some heightening, and heighten she did.

2.) They compress time.

When I asked my toddler how school was, she stated that “Camden hit me today.”  At pick-up the next day, my concerned husband asked the teacher about this, and learned that Camden did in fact hit her…in September (an incident we already knew about).  I asked my daughter again about Camden, and she repeated “Camden hit me today.”

“You mean, a while ago.”

“Yes, a while ago today.”

For toddlers, “today” means “any time they can remember.”  “Yesterday” covers a range of dates spanning from 30 seconds ago all the way back to birth, and “tomorrow” implies an immediacy you can’t possibly deliver on.

3.) They pull a “Keyser Soze.”

The greatest trick my daughter ever pulled was convincing me that it all happened.

My toddler’s daily report from school:

“We watered the plants and made projects with purple paint and purple paper.  Then I ate goldfish and watched “Winnie the Pooh” on the green rug.”

“That sounds great, honey.”  Satisfied that she had a productive and enriching day, I hung up her coat.

Her purple coat.

Hmmm.  I looked around our living room and- boom!  There was a plant on our windowsill…next to a fish tank with our goldfish swirling around.  Her Winnie the Pooh stuffed animal on the rug.  The green rug.

And like that…poof…her credibility’s gone.

4.) They merge fiction with reality.

Toddlers have active fantasy lives and highly-developed inner worlds.  My three-year old’s world is a place where her belly button sings pop songs, her stuffed bunny eats her dinner for her, and her best friend is an invisible purple unicorn named “Biggly Boggly.”  It doesn’t surprise me that she draws upon television, books, and movies as creative launching pads, but it does make me question her reality.

For example:  it took me weeks before I figured out that “Caillou” was not a boy in her class, that she had no teacher named ‘Miss Nelson’, and her story of all the animals escaping during a trip to the zoo was just the plot of “Madagascar.”

5.) They present a desired outcome as fact.

More wishful thinking than straight-up lying, sometimes they will tell you what they think you want to hear:

“I pooped in the potty today!” my toddler exclaimed as she came in the door.  I looked at my husband.  “Did she?”

“If by ‘potty’ she means ‘carseat,’ then yes.”

Other times, they will tell you what THEY want to hear:

“Daddy said I can have chocolate milk for dinner.”

Did he, now?

As frustrating as it is to try and suss out the truth from my toddler’s pronouncements, I realize I’m just as guilty of spinning yarns.   The t.v. isn’t really “broken,” Bunny Bun #1 isn’t off on vacation somewhere, and if she keeps eating bubble solution, she probably won’t turn into a bubble and float away.

Clearly I have no problem saying what I need to say in order to create meaningful moments with my daughter (and avoid calling poison control). And as I step into the rainbow-and singing belly button-filled world of my toddler, I know that the best narrators are occasionally unreliable.