For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for June 22, 2018

I know what Michael means. A baby in lavender on a lavender blanket being handed to you by a mother wearing lavender. It is too much.

Face it, Michael, you’ll be a sibling all your life.

I feel the same way when holding babies. They always seem to cry.

Give him a break, he’s a 5 year old with a short attention span.

It takes a while longer to bond with a new sibling, especially a girl….give him a little space….he’ll come ’round.

Very normal. A child at that age has an attention span of a gnat. That thing on his lap is not doing anything interesting, like spinning, spouting phrases or change colors. Time to move on and give this thing back to mom.

Someone told me the best gift to give a child is a sibling, but I privately thought she would change her mind if she met my Mother’s sisters. My parents were married over 20 years before Dad died, and he never said a bad word about them. Fifteen years later, my sister’s future husband met them for 20 minutes and called them a bunch of shreks. Wish Dad had seen that.

Mom, come back; the baby’s crying!

I took a picture of a friend’s 5 year old son holding his sister. I gave it to the family. 30 years later, I gave a copy to the girl as a birthday present. She liked it a lot. The mother was a little miffed as she was going to give hers at some point, but not very much. Little things mean a lot.

So this whole week has been a flashback-within-a-flashback..

My husband had virtually NO experience with babies before meeting me & my “horde”. My sister asked me to hold her baby daughter for a moment while she took care of something. I asked my husband if he wanted to; he (kind of) did. I had him hold her facing him, his hand behind her head. She looked up at him, smiled, leaned forward & went THUMP against his chest. She leaned back against his hand again, smiled…THUMP. Poor guy didn’t know what to do. My sister came back, saw this & said to him, “She must like you.”

I had to teach my daughter-in-law how to hold her baby daughter (my son, too.) Somehow this skill is not natural for all people.

I had the same scene with my son and my daughter…. he was holding his newborn sister, not quite sure about the situation and suddenly…SHE THREW UP ON HIM! And then, like Michael, I hear the piercing scream, “MOMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!” At least he didn’t throw her to the floor!

This series has brought back great memories: We started with a birth daughter J. Two years later, we adopted a 3-mo-old boy B. Although J started off by trying to sit on B in the back yard, they became great buddies. Several years, another birth daughter CJ. About 3 years later, we adopted another boy CM. The usual requirement for adoption is that the adoptee be younger, but CM was an urgent 4.5 yr-old “special-needs”. When we came home with him, we gave him the garden hose to “introduce” himself to the others (they had a BALL!!). But later, CJ pulled her mother into a bedroom and sobbed, “Now I won’t get to be a big sister!!” (By the way, the usual case in adoptions is that whatever the age of the adoptee, it will be about that long before they really get settled. They were right.)

(Forgive me, that did turn out to be awfully long!)

What a gorgeous panel of the two of them looking at each other, that’s love!