Page 63 of Own the Eights Maybe Baby
Wowza! That insane VR experience had seeped into her fictional fantasy friend world.
“And you, Jordan, you own a fitness establishment. Do you have any programs for young children?” Stu continued as Jordan’s knee bounced beneath the table.
If her tell was a Texas-sized smile stretched across her face, then his was the nervous kid knee bop.
“No, like Georgie, when it comes to kids, I mostly work with teenagers.”
“He runs an after-school program for them,” she added, gently resting her hand on his leg, that could have given a jackhammer a run for the money. Thankfully, her touch was enough to put the kibosh on his under-the-table tap dance.
“I see,” Stu said with a furrowed brow.
“I think this calls for the FBI,” Lenny added with a solemn nod.
Her jaw dropped. This debrief sure went to hell in a handbasket quickly!
“You’re concerned that we’ll be such awful parents that you want to get law enforcement involved? The simulation glitched, and the baby gushed poo like a burst fire hydrant. Maybe we should get a do-over before you take that step,” she pleaded.
Jordan raised his hand. “I second a do-over. And, for the record, Georgie and I grocery shop at least once a week, and we’ve never seen a surge of anything like that come out of a baby.”
Lenny sat back. “Yes, the system glitched, but when parenting, one must be ready forlife’slittle glitches.”
“Especially, when babies and children are involved, a situation can go south in an instant, and you need to be ready to react,” Stu added.
“But does it require notifying the Federal Bureau of Investigation?” Jordan pressed.
Lenny and Stu chuckled, and she and her husband stared blankly at the men.
What was so funny?
“Not that FBI. A facilitated baby intervention,” Stu explained.
She released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Between Jordan rattling on about the baby NFL and now a baby FBI, she’d need to start writing down all these acronyms.
“What’s a facilitated baby intervention?” she asked as her heart rate slowed.
“Think of it as a Battle of the Births remedial activity,” Stu answered.
And her heart rate shot back up. “So, as of right now, we’re not even on pre-parenting grade level?”
“Parenting can’t be graded, Georgie. It’s more of a spectrum of skills,” Lenny said, drawing a bell curve into the air with his hand.
She stared at the invisible line. “Where would we be on that spectrum?”
The man pointed into the air at a spot decidedly below and far, far from the top of the curve.
“Yikes!” Jordan exclaimed. “We’re not even close to the bell?”
She shook her head. They couldn’t be that terrible.
“We’ve tried to figure out what skills we need. I googled parenting books and got two hundred and sixty-eight million different results.”
“And I searched the phrase ‘how to be a good parent’ and got six hundred and fifteen million results,” Jordan added.
She threw up her hands. “Where do you even start? We’d read part of one book only to have another tell you to do the opposite.”
Seriously! What did people do?
“The thing is, Georgie and I want to be the best parents we can for our child,” Jordan said softly, and his words went right to her heart.
