About 22 months after the arrival of my beautiful, hairy little baby boy, my beautiful bald headed little boy arrived, weighing in at 8lb 11 oz. His head look like a peeled onion, and his little round face and gorgeous blue eyes made him adorable. He wore home made, hand-me-down gowns and slept a couple of nights in the hand-me-down bassinett Momma made, just for show. As with Jim, the bassinett was close quarters for my big babies and they quickly graduated into a full sized crib. You know, the kind that they say are so dangerous now? We named him Timothy Alan, after nobody. I just loved the name. So, now we had a Jimmy and a Timmy. That would prove to be a problem through the years, because I'd get the names mixed up when I was scolding them when they got into mischief. That was often. And because they were near the same age, people wanted to know if they were twins, and couldn't remember who was who. Sometimes I couldn't either.
Timmy was somewhat of a colicly baby. No amount of singing, rocking, waltzing Matilda, pacifiers, or shaking rattles would stop the constant colic. Now this was the day when Paregoric was a God-send. I still don't know what the stuff is, but I think it is probably on the controlled substance list now, and I can tell you that it works! I learned just the right amount of drops to put in sweetened water to knock him cold. After about three months, the colic stopped. He took up a new habit. Rocking.
Jimmy was a little put out that he had someone taking over the limelight. More than once, he conked Timmy on the head with his plastic shovel and swiped the bottle from his mouth, proceeding to "hide" under the crib sucking away. I can see it now, with his little feet pushing up on the mattress from beneath, enjoying every drop of the formula until I could pull him out. Timmy in the meantime, was crouching on all fours, rocking that crib across the room. Each day I'd go and pull it back to the other side of the room where it was supposed to be, finding pacifiers, stuffed toys, and empty bottles in the wake. That was his new tranquilizer. He would rock himself into a stupor and fall asleep. I did find some consolation in the fact that I wasn't "doping" him up. But that rocking did get on my nerves, especially when his head was banging on the front panel of the crib at night.
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Later as the two little "menaces" grew into toddlers, Jimmy managed to bite the neighbors child on the cheek leaving a clear bite mark of all the teeth he had, and discovered a whole gallon of oil based white paint which he proceeded to use to paint the aforementioned child, along with himself. Not pretty. It's a wonder I didn't kill him washing that paint off with turpentine! That child's mother gave me a tongue lashing that won't wait and banned him from playing with her child until further notice.
Timmy, learned to walk at 8 months old. What he and his brother couldn't get in to hasn't been invented. Together, they would get into my kitchen cabinets and go from one end to the other scattering pots, pans, stale cookies, old toast, and anything else that happened to be there. They were just far back up in the cabinets that I couldn't reach them. They giggled. I yelled. Nap time never came soon enough. Tim rocked on. We lived on a lake so Sollie had to build a little fenced area for them to play. Occasionally, they would escape and since I was always watching out the kitchen window for such a moment, I would jump out the back door and scoop them up before they hit the water, thanking God I made it in time. Chicken wire fences weren't made to keep little boys out of trouble.
And there was the time when Jimmy poked newspaper up into the furnace in the basement and the house filled with smoke causing an embarrassing false alarm for the local fire department. And who could forget Timmy climbing into the washing machine tub, and Jimmy turning the knob "ON." Or the time they played "war" on the red clay dirt mounds two blocks away, while I was frantically searching the neighborhood for them. This earned them a switching and "time out" in the corner of their bedroom. They cried themselves to sleep and when I found them, I almost cried because they looked so sweet with their tear stained, red dirt faces that only showed their eyeballs.
The sweetest moments of child rearing are when they come creeping in your bed in the wee hours of the morning, just because they want to be close to you. At the time, when you're cramped, two toddlers and two adults in a very small full sized bed with one above your head and another on your feet, you don't think it's so sweet. Now, some 59 years later, I yearn for the days when my boys just wanted to near Momma and Daddy and snuggle.
