This sounds interesting.

Innocence is destroyed. Allegiances are betrayed. War rages.

As Told by the Vivian Girls draws inspiration from the illustrations and 15,000-plus pages of renowned Chicago outsider artist Henry Darger, a recluse who lived in Lincoln Park and shared his art with no one. His imagination overflowed in his prolific stories and drawings, The Realms of the Unreal, where little girls battle against child slavery.

In this choose-your-own-adventure staging, audience members move throughout the entire facility of Theater on the Lake creating their own experience. The audience follows 15 characters on separate, overlapping journeys through celebrations, conflicts of faith and acts of war that culminate in a selection of two simultaneous endings.

Timelies all!

I think I'm glad I didn't hear that story about early motherhood.

Signed, My college boyfirnds would have been =bad= husbands for me, and I didn't date for most of my 20s.

Sunny Day smoothie, why do you turn evil and hurt me so after tasting so delicious?

Though it was completely accidental, my brother having kids while in undergrad/grad school has worked ok for him & his wife. They have a time flexibility when the kids are little that they won't have in a few years. However, they are really barely scraping by financially on a grad student salary and P's (appallingly low) day care salary (which does get a great discount on childcare! They couldn't afford it otherwise.) D starts kinder this fall, and the next few years are post-doc'ing, which means a lot of moves in his elementary years.

And then there are my parents. Their main timing driver was...they didn't have health care insurance until my dad got the tenure track position. Exciting, huh?!

and how if you were only doing it right, you too could have an unattended waterbirth while whales sang to you

I could have had WHALES?

t furiously taking notes for pregnancy #2...

(Though the "unattended" part doesn't sound all that great - I'm more than happy to have someone else wash the gunk off before they hand the kid back to me.)

I hope she find out that it doesn't have to be this way, and that joking about throwing the baby out the window or leaving it with strangers is not normal.

Man, I'm doing everything wrong.

I'd be kind of scared of someone so immersed in the cult of parenthood that they remain cheery in the face of no sleep or a toddler who can hit that really high note when crying.

As Betsy HP used to say, that woman is on her back porch drinking gin out of the catfood dish when you're not looking.

I'm more than happy to have someone else wash the gunk off before they hand the kid back to me.

See? That's why the kid's so obviously d0000000000med! Never mind the blatant happy and loved front.

My brother loves to horrify other parents. Well, actually other anything. It's a comic train wreck when he encounters a One True Perfect Way person. He loves to be contrary and stir shit up and he's really good at it.

When Dylan was about 3 weeks old I popped him in the stroller (Dear Perfect Parent, try wearing a baby carrier 3 weeks after a fucking c-section, kthxbye) and walked down to the coffee shop on the corner to get lunch. I hadn't slept since he was born and was looking frazzled enough that the woman behind the counter said "Oh, don't worry - they'll learn to smile right before you're ready to throw 'em out the window!"

To which I responded without really thinking "Oh good! Because we live on the fourth floor and I don't think he'd make it!"

The look on her face let me know she hadn't expected me to take it that far. Oops!

Heh.

Bah, one of my snapdragons is giving up the ghost rather suddenly. Why, I have no clue, the other one in that pot (on from the same box) is fine. One of the other pots is all bedraggled but seems to be coming back (I think it got too much water in a rainstorm.) I think I'll buy some more this weekend.

Aargh! I just caught my new kitty peeing in my laudry basket!!!!