Learning How To Count All the Heads

The other day, I spent at least five minutes trying to figure out whether or not my children and baby sitter would fit into the car. Normally, this wouldn’t even be an issue, as my car seats eight, but the third row and passenger seat were filled with bags of children’s clothing and toys that I had yet to drop off at Goodwill. Solving the problem brought me back to eighth-grade algebra. Let’s see: My husband has the two boys at a chess tournament. I have the remainder of the crew. The car has room for four — the baby sitter, the girls, and me. Good, I thought. We’ll fit.Except that when we all went to get into the car, it became quite clear that I had made a small miscalculation — an 8-pound miscalculation, to be exact. In my sleep-deprived state, I forgot Nathaniel, the baby I had a month ago. Poor Nate!You don’t need to have five children to lose track, but having four or more certainly increases your odds of, well, misplacement. I asked a bunch of city dwellers with four, five, six, seven, and, yes, even eight children, to tell me about their most recent parental faux pas. For a newly minted mother of five, they were entertaining — and a relief.“I admit it,” a mother of five children said. “Over the summer, we all piled into the car to go to the movies. We were in the Hamptons. We almost got into town before I realized that I had left my youngest child at home. She was taking a nap, thank God, and didn’t realize we were gone. But my older kids knew what happened. I felt terrible.” One father of four also forgot a sleeping child, but he wasn’t left at home.“We were late for a gym class on a Sunday afternoon and I jumped out of the car with one kid, and my husband went to park the car with the three others,” his wife said. “When he met me at the class, though, he only had two of the kids. It didn’t take me long to realize that he left the youngest asleep in the garage down the block. We raced back and found the garage attendant driving the car down to the basement with my sleeping child in the seat behind him. He almost had a heart attack when I told him to turn around.”The truth is that this could happen to any of us. Or could it? Does it take a certain laissez-faire personality type to be able to combine hectic city life with a multitude of children? Does this relaxed style increase the odds of losing track of a child or two?“I am one of six,” a friend, describing her own childhood, said, “but we spent most afternoons and summers hanging out in the backyard, basement, or nearby beach. My mother was very organized and calm and could deal with the natural chaos of a big family, but we never got taken to individual activities, and I can’t really remember ever getting on an airplane together. That’s very different from the current parenting style in the city.”Traveling does seem to pose a number of practical opportunities to lose track of a child. More than one parent mentioned leaving a sleeping child on an airport van. One mother got on a plane and, luckily, realized she was short a child before the plane took off.A friend with more than a half dozen checked into a hotel at midnight with her crew. Between the reception area and the rooms, she and her husband lost a child.“We got to the hotel at midnight, and by the time we checked in it was 1 in the morning. All the kids had fallen asleep on the couches in the lobby,” she recalled. “When we were ready to go to the rooms, I rounded everyone up and made sure they were following. We walked to the rooms — out the main lobby and to a separate pavilion. We got to our three rooms and I started to organize. I have one son who likes to be in the bathroom for a while, so when my husband and I counted heads about 45 minutes later, we assumed he was in the bathroom. A little while later, though, he hadn’t come out. We asked the other kids if they had seen him. No one had. My husband went back to the lobby and after a short search, found him fast asleep on another couch. He had gotten up, followed some of the kids, then fallen back asleep on a different couch. I guess the moral of the story is to always look back!”Or perhaps the moral should be directed at the children who find themselves in these large families. Look forward! Pay attention! And most important, don’t fall asleep on planes, trains, and automobiles.sarasberman@aol.com

Learning How To Count All the Heads

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