Drip, Drip, Drip

Pin It No one does Chinese Water Torture like women, small children, and babies. This is perhaps part of the reason my husband has said he does not want a third child (he'd be utterly surrounded); but I'm here to re-state the obvious: I'm breaking him down.

I'm working on Phase Two of the Lori Wants Baby Campaign, whereby I stealthily leave seemingly random photos of our children as infants in seemingly random locations around the house. Like, beside the toilet. Nothing says daddy needs a third baby like a picture of Lawson eating cheerios while he makes a deposit.

Phase Two also involves seemingly random conversational interruptions designed to break his concentration and focus it on said infant. Example: "Don't you think it's strange how neither of our other children ended up with dark brown hair and blue eyes? Our next could, though. Because I have a gene for brunette hair, and you have a gene for blue eyes, and I think that works, even though I'm not a geneticist. Wouldn't that be a lovely combination?"

Even though he stares at me in something akin to horror, and turns the car radio up a little louder, I think it's working.

Phase Two also involves random, but entirely logical attacks of pure unadulterated reason. Case in point. We're in the middle of discussing...I don't know. Something. Dinner. "You how there's that one buck that you haven't gotten yet?" He looks at me warily. "That Pope and Young or Brooks and Dunn or something? That raison d'etre that's just waiting for you in the woods? The reason you can't stop deer hunting yet?"

"Well...I don't know about a raisin, but it's more the challenge than anything else..."

Hmm. I try to figure out how to work this into my speech. The reason for motherhood is not the challenge. Definitely not. I decide to ignore it. That usually works. "Whatever. If I told you that you had to stop hunting tomorrow, how would you feel? If you fell out of a tree and had to sit in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, how would you feel? Would the longing go away?"

"Uh...maybe..."

"Yeah--when you were eighty!"

He laughed. Gotcha. "That's how I feel about having another baby."

He gave me a pointed look. "What's to say you won't continue to feel that way after you have another one?"

I don't really have an answer for this. Except--"Well, I'll probably be old by then and have more sense."

That effectively ends that random attack.

Phase Two also includes the immediate and completely annoying dispersal of any and all notifications of the presence of infants and/or large families in my immediate vicinity. This can be as simple as a "Ooooh, look--someone's having another baby on Private Practice!" when we're watching t.v. (which can backfire when that same someone has a miscarriage or goes haywire and kills their husband or something) or it can get a little more complicated. For example. The other morning when I was dropping the kids off at school, I noticed I was behind a van with those little white stick-figure families on the window. The family had three--count 'em--three children, and the license plate said "HVNSNT." How perfect. So I snapped a picture with my phone and sent it to him with a text that said something along those lines. "Family of FIVE. How adorable." I do that all the time now--call when I'm in McDonalds--"guess what's in front of me? A cute little baby..." (in cutesy baby talk, of course). When we're out together, and pass one somewhere, I start singing. "They're everywhere! They're everywhere!"

Like, I said, folks. Chinese Water Torture. Feel the drip. Be the drip.

I am The Drip, and I am Relentless.