Tubular hugs

I might be loving the boys too much. Actually, WE, the mom and dad, love on those boys so much that I'm trying to impose a limit on hugs and kisses. Sarah will get a hold of them and just bathe them in smooches, and I don't want them becoming too soft. We all see those moms hugging on their kids too much and it could lead to a life of weakness, or worse, dependency. I have no social or scientific evidence for this, but it's just my immediate concern. I think we need to have a third kid just to spread the love out a little. Or maybe get a puppy. And that brings me to the source of my concern: our dog. There's not a softer animal on the planet, and although it's nice to be loved by another species, Paco is a moping love addict who isn't happy unless he can sit on you. He's 70 pounds. Which goes to show you the importance of getting a pet before kids. If we hadn’t, our boys would share our bed and lie across the bathroom door whenever we used the toilet.

Yesterday, when I was hugging Otto for the tenth time, I became somewhat repulsed by myself. I never was going to be one of those dads that hugged and kissed their kids. I didn't grow up that way, and when I saw kids that did, I could sense their weakness. Somehow I'm going to have to drop a proclamation, a decree I guess, on the family: less love.

Although I’m off to a poor start. First off, I shaved Otto's head before our Thanksgiving trip to Houston. His hair is short, cancer short. I put on the wrong clipper attachment and all it took was one strafing and it was over. There was no fixing the missing swath in the back of his head. So I took it all off, and when Quin shouted, "Mom, you should see Otto's head!" she had a hard time suppressing her "are you freaking kidding me" look. I can't blame her. For one we were rushing to get to the airport and that's really not the time to give anyone a haircut, and two, she doesn't see her family often and so she wants her boys looking their best. Now I think it's grown on us, as cancer kids are apt to do, and it kind of fits Otto. But now his little fuzzy bean is the most kissable landscape on the planet.

Yes, I just said that. WTF has happened to me. I once punched a hole in the wall.

However, I should give credit to Quin for doing his best to repel closeness. He has become fascinated with farting--a phenomena that elicits the most intense kid laughter I’ve ever heard--and he has a new-found curiosity for all things childbirth. It is those kind of questions that make you want to run the other way. But he caught me off guard the other day, and I'm still running my answer over in my head to make sure I didn't lead him astray.

He'd brought me a picture he drew of him inside his mom's belly, and his question was, "how did I get out?" The stork was of really no help here, at least not the vision I had of giant bird getting at a fetus, so I had to let him lead conversation.

"Do they just cut open the belly?" he pantomimed with a slicing motion and big eyes. I thought maybe I could leave it there. Because that does happen, and more and more according to the Cesarean surveys, but his vision seemed a little more violent than I think most obstetricians would recommend.

"Um," I opened strongly with a pause (yes, pregnant.) "Quin, the baby gets to a certain point, and then it..." And my inner Google was busy searching images and terms. I'm sensitive to the topic because the truth of how babies get out is pretty damn horrifying. As a matter of fact, the first thing Quin ever heard was his father saying, "I'm going to pass out." So I chose carefully. I sanitized it a bit and found the perfect word: "Tubes." Tubes can be both biological and sterile so I went with, "At a certain point the baby comes out of a tube."

He looked up at me waiting for more. Like that there had to be more to it than a tubes.

"So..." he began locking his eyes for any nuance of confirmation or denial, "do you suck it out like with a straw?"

That's not where I wanted to go with this. In my head I had the uterus, in his there was a vacuum. I can't think of a worse way for him to share the facts about childbirth. With thoughts of snipers, I took the conversation a little more internal.

"No...not quite." Not at all. "Quin there's a tube already inside your mom and that’s where you came out of."

I paused and hoped that was sufficient. There are so many questions--so many questions that I still have about how this happens.

"Where is the tube?" Damn. He probably imagined a curly slide. I could see in his curious excitement that his mom was something like a Playplace where you had to be a certain height and you couldn’t go in until you took off your shoes. So I set to end any further investigation.

"The tube is inside your mom, Quin." I sautered the case near closed and finished the job with, "When there's a baby ready to be born, they use the tube."

He watched me, like we were about to lay down our cards. I didn't want him to be disappointed, but I could tell he was hoping there was more. His cutting open the belly option had really excited him, but I was pretty happy when I overheard him explaining it to his little brother: "Otto, when you're born in mom's belly you come out of a tube."

Not sexy, but not brutal. I was pretty proud. And dammit it kind of makes me want to hug him.