Welcome to The Urinal, Lou!

Well, it’s official. Lou has finally surpassed The Others as my favorite child.

In case you didn’t know, we had a fourth baby. All the way back in September. His name is Lou, and until recently, he’s been a huge pain in the butt.

He’s had colic and he doesn’t nap much and he’s been a major buzzkill. 

My mom stayed with us for the first month or so to help us out, which might be the only reason we’re all alive today. But there were many evenings when neither she, nor I, nor Tighe knew what to do with him to calm him.

The pediatrician called it an “immature digestive system” and recommended a very expensive probiotic, which helped and he continues to take it daily to this day.

“I predict that he’ll turn a corner around 6 or 8 weeks,” she told a very confused Erin at his one-month appointment, “and then you’ll be coming to me at his fourth-month check-up with a totally different baby.”

And she was right. Lou’s still not a big napper and he still has reflux that keeps him up some nights. But he smiles and laughs and interacts with us, and that makes up for all the inexplicable crying spells that characterized the first few weeks of his life. 

We love him!

And we’ve all welcomed him in different ways.

Nate and Sam knew that I was having a baby. They were well aware that when I went in for my scheduled C-section on the morning of September 17th, they’d soon know whether they had a new baby brother or baby sister and a few days later, we’d welcome him home. But at 5 and 7 years old, they’re also so self-involved that a new baby in the house really didn’t faze them at all. 

We soon trained Nate to fetch Lou when he cried and soothe him and bring him to me when I was busy talking Tess down from a sociopathic rage. Or coaxing her to pee because she clearly had to pee, doing her pee dance in a corner somewhere but absolutely refusing to get near a toilet. Because that’s how I spent a lot of those first few weeks. So Nate’s been a big help.

And Sam…is Sam. Sam loves babies, so he lays with Lou and cuddles with Lou and holds his hand and kisses his fingers. Which is all sweet and tender and cute until you consider the fact that Sam never washes his hands and is constantly covered in marker and dirt and Cheeto cheese. And I don’t even buy Cheetos.

And then there’s Tess. Despite my efforts to prepare her, she didn’t really know what having a new baby would entail. Plus she wanted a sister. For the first week or so, she referred to Lou as a “she” and told people her new baby was a girl. But she also loves babies, so she’s been very sweet with him, just resentful of the amount of time I spend with him.

“Don’t feed Lou!” she says often. We’ve had manybattles. Especially since Lou’s birth coincided with her graduation from the Terrible Two’s and her emergence as a Threenager.  As recently predicted by my sister-in-law, her teenage years might kill me.

Meanwhile, four days before Lou was born, the company that I do the majority of my contract writing for pushed up all their deadlines by six weeks, which meant I was already behind. So when I packed my hospital bag, I tucked my laptop inside, and though I didn’t do any work that first day—I was too busy vomiting and requesting painkillers and watching Tighe eat a greasy cheeseburger, fries, and milkshake right in front of me—I was typing away in between visitors.

I’ve been scrambling to catch up ever since, which is why my blog hasn’t been updated since Lou was born. 

Until now.

I just took a big step away from that contract role and I now have a queue of PBU blogs lined up, most of them stories about Sam, who will turn 6 this Friday. Nate and Tess obviously makes appearances, too, but I’m having trouble putting Tess’s “essence” into words. There are just so many emphatic mannerisms and dramatic facial expressions that I laugh at but can’t seem to describe. 

And she’s bossy. I think 2019 made it sexist to call girls bossy, but I honestly cannot think of a better word to describe her, even with the help of a thesaurus. Yesterday, she instructed me to go upstairs and change her baby’s diaper—a doll, not Lou—and I obliged, mostly because I needed some quiet time away from her.

But this post isn’t supposed to be about Tess. It’s about Lou and welcoming him to the world and to The Peanut Butter Urinal. In the future, when you see Lou’s name mentioned, you’ll know, “Oh, right, somewhere in the middle of the country, Erin’s still alive and she had another baby.”

Read it, don’t read it, I don’t care. What I’ve discovered is that these blogs are great for Tighe and I to look back on and remember these silly stories that are simultaneously meaningless and meaningful. 

When I tell a funny story about something one of my kids said, the response from older, veteran moms is always: Write it down!

Well, I did, and I am.