You would think that after two other children we wouldn’t stress out about a third. We’d just add it to the pile and hardly notice. But strangely enough, I’ve had several different people tell me that the third child is the worst. Not “the worst” as in moral character (I hear third borns are actually pretty impeccable character wise) but “the worst” as far as causing stress on the parents. If it was a difficulty graph, the third child would be peak difficulty and then the line would drop as you have more elves helping in the workshop. Or so I’m told. I believe my brother Matt is one of the people who told me this and since Marlene, his wife, is expecting their ninth child in January I’ll take his word for it. Maybe it’s because your third child is the first time during your gig as a parent that your dependents outnumber your arms. This is good for your tax returns but removes your ability to pick each child up by the scruff of their neck and physically remove them from suboptimal situations. It’s when the prisoners start to realize that they outnumber the guards. The best thing you can do is start training the older to take care of the younger. You know, delegate. Offload your tasks so you don’t become task saturated. Of course, delegating some of your parenting to a four year (in our case) has its downsides.

It’s amazing how the younger children learn from the older. Elliot copies everything Adi does which Adi occasionally finds very frustrating. So do her parents because Adi isn’t always the perfect role model. Shoot, her parents aren’t the perfect role models either. It’s become very apparent to me that, if you train the oldest child well, they will make your job as a parent that much easier when more children show up. You, whether you like it or not, start multiplying your successes and your mistakes through your children. And they multiply those mistakes and successes to their siblings. In the spirit of this concept, I’ve been trying to quickly brush up on my parenting skills so I can correct this listing ship before it capsizes and sinks. It seems like every good parent wants their children to be better than them. This means that every good parent is a hypocrite because we teach standards higher than we follow ourselves. Maybe that’s why raising kids can be so frustrating; they show us our hypocrisy. One thing that drives me nuts is my kids unwillingness to work. I don’t know what that says about me but I’ve been assigning Adi chores around the house so she learns some responsibility. One of those chores is to take care of Hop Hop 2. If you remember, our first Hop Hop was tragically outgunned by an outlaw dog (read that here) but since then we’ve replenished our bunny population with a second Hop Hop. He’s the same kind of bunny and comes from the same proud bunny lineage, he just happens to be a female and is all white in color. Same, same, but different. It is now Adi’s job to take her food and water every day.

During the summer my bunny husbandry strategy was to move the little hutch around the yard every few days. This way the piles of bunny poop would be scattered around evenly. By the time the hutch would return to the same spot in the yard, the poop would have disintegrated. This worked fine until the weather turned cold and our yard (and the bunny pebbles) turned into stone and began piling up. It was beginning to look like a Cocoa Pebble factory back there. Also, Hop Hop’s water bottle began to freeze solid. I needed to adapt my strategy. So I purchased a plug-in water bottle that promised to prevent ice from building up. Now I just needed somewhere to plug it in. The solution was to put the bunny on the porch in front of a window so I could run an extension cord through our window’s floppy, worn out seals and to my premium bunny husbandry setup. Janice pointed out that this method moved the piles of poop from the backyard to the front porch, which was worse. I acknowledged housing a bunny poop factory on the front porch was a problem. I solved it by adding a foot of height to the hutch’s legs and putting a Rubbermaid tote under the wire cage to collect all Hop Hop’s indiscretions. Then I could simply dump the Cocoa Pebbles into the trash on Thursday evening right before trash truck makes it rounds. This kind of worked except that a bunny’s urinary tract design closely mimics that of a fire hydrant and so she frequently overshot the tote. But, this is how the process of engineering goes. You tweak and tweak until you get something that works. Like I explained to Janice, it’s just unrealistic to expect something like a bunny hutch on the porch to work perfectly right away. A good engineer wouldn’t let a little bunny pee on the porch stop him from persisting until he beat a bad design into a poor one.

“A good engineer wouldn’t stop a project halfway through it,” She said. I’m not sure what she was implying.

Of course, I didn’t have enough time to beat my bad idea into submission before we left for Michigan for our Thanksgiving observance. Despite the risk of breaking child labor laws, I paid a second grader who lived nearby to feed the bunny while we were gone. Our Thanksgiving went as planned. We mostly loafed on the couch except that one day when we managed to start up some power tools and heavy equipment and chopped firewood fervently until the football game started. Then we ate some of the best stuffing I’ve ever had, loafed again, and then drove home to find Hop Hop had used her biological fire hydrant to splatter up the front porch. Urine graffiti is tasteless art and Janice didn’t appreciate it on her porch.

“I don’t want to be the kind of people who have barnyard animals on the front porch,” Janice said. “It’s disgusting.”

The bunny has been relocated beside the garden since the garden is the only thing that appreciates an occasional sprinkling of urine.

Speaking of getting sprinkled with urine… None of our children have ever presented a spray threat when you changed their diapers. None of them until Oliver, that is. His timing is impeccable and his aim is indiscriminate. This gives whoever is changing his diaper the urgency of a race car pit crew. Rip the old diaper off, wipe quickly, and slap that new diaper on there before nature calls. It’s like getting out of a trench and charging a machine gun nest. But that’s not the only bad habit he has. He is eating so much that he’s growing rolls of fat around his legs and chin and yet it doesn’t seem to bother him a bit. He’s really letting himself go. He also produces as much gas as an oil refinery, which is not as convenient as you might think. Most of the day he just lounges around and yells at us when he needs something, kind of like an entitled old codger. Janice is right, in many ways babies are just little old people. We start out all wrinkly, immobile, toothless, gassy, squinting, and wearing diapers and we end up that way too. The only difference is that the older you get, the easier the gas comes out.

That theory has been on display at our house.

One of the duties of a parent is to help their children become fully functional. We should find our kid’s talents and encourage them to pursue them, change the world, and generally make the parents look good. Adi definitely has a creative streak in her but she’s also terrific at belching. I know that an art degree is the poster child for useless educations but I feel like, if you had to choose between an art degree and a career in burping, an art degree would actually be useful. Currently I’m dealing with it by making her say “Excuse me” after she rattles the rafters. We’re not animals after all. She’s not an innocent victim of an accidental belch, she can burp on demand and at will. I guess I should brag because while most four year olds are learning to say their ABCs, my child is already honing the skills she needs to burp them. It’s almost like being bilingual really. Elliot is being a quick study as well. Honestly though my daughter’s talent shouldn’t surprise me much. She inherited it from her mother.

Now that may sound like a mean thing to say but Janice grew up with a couple brothers and she used to take great pride in her belching ability. It was a craft that she honed while milking the cows on the farm and, with a lot of hard work, dedicated practice, and some natural ability, she soon learned to surpass her brothers. I guess it’s like riding a bicycle because once you learn it, you always got it. She still serenades me unexpectedly while I’m in the kitchen looking for something to eat. Weirdly though, I found she’s doesn’t like displaying her talents in public much. It’s OK, sometimes I’m shy about my talents too. Honestly, as a man that can’t even burp that well, I do find myself impressed. I guess sometimes you have to live vicariously through others. The most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done is try to play sports.

It seems like every blog comes down to talking about some sort of bodily function. Let’s pull this post out of the toilet (see what I did there) by trying to draw some lesson from this story. Honestly, when we first got married we were scared of grossing the other one out. I remember being nervous every time I used the bathroom because Janice might smell it. Our first house didn’t have a bathroom fan so it was a real concern. Those days are long gone! I’m very happy that Janice no longer feels she needs to impress me and vice versa. A relationship built on honesty is awesome and if Janice ever feels she can’t practice her belching in front of me, something is wrong! You can’t learn to become one if you put walls up. You learn to become one by tearing walls down. I married an incredibly warm, hospitable, graceful woman who happens to have great vocal range whether it’s singing, yodeling, or belching. I guess you could say that anything that comes out of her mouth is impressive, although I still find the words “I love you” more inspiring than anything else.

Editor’s Note: This blog was previewed and published with the permission of my amazing wife who, thank God, has a sense of humor and patience for her husband’s ability to embarrass her in public.