Becky Jo told me a crazy story tonight. One of her coworkers had a child. (WAIT FOR IT.) I guess she found out it was a boy, they picked out the name Donovan, “Van” for short, everything is good, she has a long intense labor and gives birth to this ten pound baby and she’s all exhausted and laying there, out of it, when the nurse comes over and hands her the newborn. “There you go,” the nurse says. “There you go to mommy, Drake.”

The woman’s like, “–DRAKE?” and the dad’s all, “Yeah, well, he didn’t look like a Donovan, so I wrote down Drake on his birth certificate instead. I already signed it.” Drake wasn’t even on the Name Table. The dad just came up with it that minute. The coworker was laughing and shrugging about it, like, “I thought it would grow on me, but it still hasn’t. Oh well. What’re you gonna do?”

Us, on the phone:

Becky: “Um, change the name?”

Becca: “Um, never have a baby with that man again?”

Babies were pretty much the order of the night, conversation-wise. I was trying to tell her how great motherhood is over the screaming of I WANNA BABA I WANNA JUUUWZ and SHE’S LOOKING RIGHT AT ME AND HER EYES ARE SEEING ME AND STOPPP IT and NOOO and OWWWWWW. Midway through the conversation, Addie stopped eating her pizza– Elias walked in wearing his bike helmet– Addie pulled it off his head, and put it upside-down in her pizza– Elias yelled and smashed it further into the pizza– and, in their hysteria, they threw the pizza-helmet on the ground where it bounced and Lola chased it and sauce and cheese went everywhere. I’m trying to explain what’s going on to Becky, and I can’t stop laughing. I mean– geez, what a mess– but still.

Becca: “Like, you think you can make stuff up about how nuts your house will be when you throw kids in the mix, but you can’t write this. Think of all the weird prerequisites you’ve have to have, like a kid wearing a helmet indoors and a handy pizza.”

Becky Jo and I talked about kids, and kids being cute, and parents who are gorgeous but have ugly kids.

Becky: “Dave doesn’t notice how cute kids are. They all look the same to him. Like, I was telling him, ‘Isn’t Elias cute? Isn’t he the cutest boy you have EVER SEEN? Have you EVER SEEN ANY BOY CUTER THAN ELIAS?’ and Dave was like, ‘Yeah, he’s cute.’ And I’m like, ‘But you’ve never seen a CUTER BOY, AM I RIGHT? SHOW ME. SHOW ME A CUTER BOY THAN HIM! I’D LIKE TO SEE YOU TRY!’”

In my dream world, Becky Jo will get pregnant this summer, move into my neighborhood, and I will have a surprise (healthy) baby a few months after her, and our kids can grow up together, and we’ll go grocery shopping and to the park and to the DMV and wherever else you go with Mom BFFS. (It’s still weird to me that I only have a few Mom Friends At All, much less Mom BFFs.) I’m starting to get that baby itch. I don’t know how to explain it until you have a kid, but it’s like a chemical reaction after a year or two that makes pregnancy seem like the best idea ever. And I know I’m having total amnesia about it. I keep going back to the entry I wrote when I was in my final trimester with Addie, which reads:

I know after Addie is here, I’m just going to be looking at her some afternoon and wonder if there was ever a time without her– if she was ever actually inside me, if I ever had that huge stomach, if her crib was ever empty. And then I can look at this entry and say, Yes. Yes, I am living that time, and it’s slow and anxiety-ridden and be glad that you’re over it. And then in another two years when Addie is two and Eli is in preschool and I start looking at baby photos and pregnant photos and thinking, Oh, God, I was so cute! Remember those rose-colored days?, I can redirect myself to this entry again and say: NO BECCA. YOU’RE DONE. DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT.

Woah, Past Becca totally called that. I know myself eerily well. I was just about to whip out the pregnancy photos, too.

Addie is sick. She seemed to totally recover, then last night started hacking again. I feel so bad for her. She’s just– poor kid. Ohh, babee, she sighs after coughing; in a mimic of Jason and I. Ohhh, poowr babee.

Eli, on the other hand, is doing awesome physically. He spent this weekend riding bikes with Phillip, and rock climbing with me. I didn’t climb as much as I got to stand and encourage him, but it was fun. The managers there totally gave me a discount, so it was nearly free to get him in. And he got top-roped by a belayer. I bought him Nerds at the end (by the way, secured its title as my favorite place once I realized it sold cheap candy and drinks), and he sat on a bench while I attacked the Impossible Wall. A little girl was waiting to use the auto-belayer after me, and after I reached the top and rappelled down, she looked at me with comically huge eyes and gasped: “Woah. You are really! good!” That made my whole MONTH. Christmas can’t touch that expression. I’m not even really good, but it’s fun to pretend. Heh.

Also– when Elias was on the bench, he was keeping up an animated conversation with the woman next to him. “I’m gettin’ a lot of pwesents,” he informed her. His little shoulders shrugged, his hands moved with the words. “Under our twee, Santa put pwesents. Red and gween. Gween is for me. Red is for Addie.”

“Wow,” the woman nodded. “And who’s Addie?”

“Oh, it’s just this baby that I know,” Elias answered. “A fwend.”

“SHE’S YOUR SISTER,” I interjected. The woman almost peed herself laughing. What is he talking about? A baby friend he knows? She lives IN YOUR HOUSE, dude. (I shouldn’t be surprised. This coming from the kid who asks four times a day if we can get rid of her or throw her in the trash when she breaks his toys.)