Hey Dads!
Do you remember when your tenth baby was born? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that for most of you that’s a solid, “Nope.” Maybe your great-grandparents remember their tenth. I remember ours. It was last week. After all, spring is in the air! Birds are laying eggs, baby bunnies are hopping around and my patient wife is delivering babies. At least one baby, anyways. She got in on the spring action by transitioning our seventh daughter, Juniper, from breathing water to breathing air.
Two of my teen daughters are reading a book with me, “Meet Me In The Middle: 10 Critical Conversations You Need To Have With Your Daughter”. I think the author was joking when he wrote this line: “Unless you are daughter #7 in a family of 12, your dad doesn’t have much experience parenting teenage girls.” I told him in an email, “We just had daughter #7 in our family of 12 last week!” By the time baby Juniper is a teenager I will have experienced parenting 6 teenage girls. What could possibly go wrong?
I’ve had a silent chuckle at the hospital with our last few babies. The nurses always come in babbling after baby’s born about bathing babies, breast-feeding babies, and bilirubin. (For a long time I wondered who Billy Ruben was and why we had to check if babies had him. Ask a new mom if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) My patient wife has bathed and breast-fed more babies than most women in Canada but she listens quietly with a smile as the well-meaning nurses explain all the do’s and dont’s of a new baby. Stats say the average Canadian family has 1.5 children. Don’t ask me how that’s possible. Haven’t seen many half-children walking around town lately.
There’s always interesting and creative comments from people when we tell them this is baby number 10: “Don’t you have a TV?” (Ironically, we don’t.) “Are they all yours?” (No. We found some wandering in the woods and started collecting them.) “Have you figured out what’s causing it?” (Very clever.) And one of my favourites: “Are you done yet?”
One of the most difficult things about having almost a dozen kids is finding names. There may be other difficult things but this is still a thing. By the time we add a middle name or two, we’ve had to come up with over twenty baby names. Our oldest daughter’s middle name is Rose and my patient wife wanted to use it again for Juniper! I could not let such a thing happen. Somehow I convinced her to use the name, Jacinth, which may or not be an actual name but it’s a precious stone and a slight nod to Juniper’s dad, yours truly.
So baby Juniper is almost two weeks old now. Everyone is happy and healthy. There’s roughly 19 hands reaching for her every time she cries so she’s well taken care of. Time flies! Make every moment count! Even the many-daughtered ones.
Jason Weening is a proud dad of 10 kids and husband of 1 wife. Please like and subscribe to his YouTube channel at heydads.ca.
