Baby in New Haven

Adam joked that because of affirmative action, he was the White Mormon Male With a Wife and Baby in his International Relations program at Yale.  (There was a White Mormon Male in the year ahead of him too.)  No one else had a spouse or children.

For the first social activity, we went with his classmates to a pizza restaurant in downtown New Haven.  Used to Pizza Hut type fare available in the West, we were sort of mystified by the choices.  We opted for a broccoli pizza, just because.

To keep 7 month Braeden happy, I handed him a sippy cup full of water to chew on.  Braeden would periodically throw the cup because he was bored and it was fun to watch me pick it back up.  (I am a devoted follower of the five-second rule.)  The man seated across the table from us was a student in the International Relations program with Adam.  He was from China.  We’d been talking with him and he’d been watching Braeden with a certain degree of curiosity and concern.  Finally after I’d picked up the cup off the floor and handed it to Braeden for about the tenth time, the man took it out of my hands.

“It’s not clean,” he said, “It’s been on the floor.  You can’t just keep handing it back to him.”

Oh. 

That was my first realization that unlike in Provo, where babies are a dime a dozen, in New Haven they were a rarity.  And everyone was watching.

Months later, Adam was on an intramural team.  The men in his program had formed a basketball team.  They were playing against a team from the law school one Saturday morning.  In Provo, we’d gone to watch intramural games.  The girlfriends and wives chatted on the sidelines of ultimate Frisbee and tried to pay attention in case our menfolk wanted to talk to us about the game later.

I strapped Braeden into an umbrella stroller and we went to watch the game.

We were the only spectators.  All the other players, from both teams, looked at us curiously. Apparently going to watch the intramural games was not something anyone did.

I wheeled Braeden over against the side of the gym.  I found a chair to sit on and left Braeden in his stroller.  There was barely room for the chair and stroller along the sidelines.  Braeden was his usual amiable self.  We could take that boy anywhere--and did.  Somewhere along the way, I pulled out a little container of Cheerios to feed Braeden.  I had the container in one hand and I would take them one at a time and give them to him.  At one point, a loose ball came flying our way, heading directly for Braeden.  Instinctively, I raised my arm to block the ball from hitting my baby.  Any mother in the world would have done the exact same thing.

Except the hand I blocked the ball with was holding a little container of Cheerios.  The impact shot Cheerios into an arc reminiscent of fireworks.  Cheerios skittered across the gym floor, halting the game until I could pick them all up.

It was the last intramural basketball game Braeden and I attended.

This picture was taken well after the above stories.  It's just for my own enjoyment...