1. Make sure they rent a car.
2. Make sure they take you back to the chocolate factory. Mmmmmmmm. (This time, notice how there's fancy modern control equipment hooked up to the antique roaster, and demand to taste the extra-extra-extra-dark.)
3. Send them off to wine country so you can get some work done. (Make sure they get wine for the dinner party you're throwing for their friends in two days.)
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I feel like I need to tell nice things about my in-laws, after my carping in the last message. (It's not their fault that I have this weird ambivalence about the entire issue of—oh my god—this child will have a father! And paternal relatives who, you know, care! Which is fabulous and the way things should be, but not really something I've ever, you know, had any experience with myself. And it's not my MIL's fault that my FIL is a sort of crypto-geneaology-freak.)
So: my mother-in-law breastfed all three of her children. The first one (born in 1965!) for 18 months. (Beaker weaned at 7 months—his CF wasn't diagnosed until he was 2 1/2, but he had pretty serious failure to thrive before that, and they were probably sort of desperate to figure out what was going on.) She's been through births with and without drugs, and they were big babies, too. She's really pretty relaxed about the whole child-rearing thing—the only crazy parenting idea of ours she's made fun of so far is cloth diapering, and, you know, we're perfectly aware that we might not really be able to hack it, no matter how cute the pastel Kissaluvs are and no matter how much we love our front-loader.
And, what's best: she raised three totally terrific, and totally different, children. Somehow Beaker was both kept healthy and kept from ever feeling sorry for himself: I feel like that's a real testament to how his parents were able to focus on the things that counted.
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