"Martin, Ann M - BSC052 - Mary Anne And Too Many Babies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin Ann M)

I pinned Rose into a fresh diaper. Then I looked around the room. "I guess I better dress you in a fresh outfit," I said. From the twins' closet I took a pale blue dress, smocked across the front. I slipped it onto Rose, then completed her outfit Ч frilly socks and dainty blue cloth shoes. She looked like a princess.
Ricky's turn. He also let me change him without fussing. Then I dressed him in a red-and-white sailor suit. "You look very handsome," I told him.
I carried the twins (one at a time) to the kitchen. I found that I had to plan ahead with the babies. Managing them took some work. For instance, to move them to the kitchen, I had to place Rose back in her crib, carry Ricky downstairs, fasten him in his high chair, re-
turn to the bedroom for Rose, then carry her downstairs and fasten her into her high chair. But so what? The babies were as good as gold.
They even gave themselves their bottles. Mr. and Mrs. Salem must have been pretty happy when the babies learned how to hold onto things.
"Ready for a walk, you guys?" I asked.
Ricky smiled at me, and a drop of milk trickled down his chin.
Rose burped, then grinned.
"Charming," I told her, giggling.
I set the twins in their double stroller and walked them down the Salems' driveway. If I do say so myself, they looked awfully cute, sitting side by side, all dressed up, smiling and cooing. I almost wished they were wearing matching outfits so people would know for sure that they were twins, and not just two unrelated babies.
We set off down the sidewalk. We passed an older woman who paused to smile at Ricky and Rose. Then we met up with a man who stopped to say, "Goodness. Ricky and Rose. You two are certainly getting big. Don't you make a fine-looking pair."
In response, Rose kicked her feet, and Ricky waved his arms around. They gurgled and grinned.
NA few minutes later, a couple of little girls
flew through the front door of a house and dashed across their lawn. "Hi, Rosie! Hi, Ricky!" they cried. Then they looked at me. "Lady, can we play with the twins, please?" asked the younger girl.
Lady? Sheesh, was I getting that old? I thought. But what I said was, "Sure, for a few minutes. I'm Mary Anne. I'm baby-sitting for the twins. What are your names?"
"Sara," said one.
"Bea," said the other.
The girls bent over the babies. They tickled them. They played peek-a-boo and pat-a-cake with them. They exclaimed over their outfits.
"I can't wait until I can baby-sit," said Bea.
"It's the best job in the world," I replied.
"Is it ever hard?" Sara asked.
"Hard? Nah," I said, completely forgetting about the times Jamie Newton refused to go to sleep, and the day Jenny Prezzioso ran a fever of 104░ and I had to call an ambulance, and the many things that had been broken by Jackie Rodowsky, the Walking Disaster. "It's always fun," I added. "I can't wait until I have children of my own." Or better yet, a baby sister, I thought.
The twins were angels," I told Dawn later that afternoon. It was almost dinnertime. Dad and Sharon
had not yet returned from work. Dawn and I had finished tossing a salad and had just stuck a casserole in the oven. It was some vegetarian thing Sharon had concocted. I didn't ask what was in it. I have found that it's better not to know.
"Rose and Ricky are pretty sweet," agreed Dawn.
"They didn't even cry today. Not even when I changed them."
"Babies are wonderful."
"I know. I don't understand why Dad and Sharon won't have one. I thought that was supposed to be part of a marriage. Look how badly Watson and Kristy's mom wanted a baby after they got married."
"Would you want a little brother or a little sister?" asked Dawn.
I hesitated. "I know I'm supposed to say I don't care as long as the baby is healthy, but, well, I would sort of like another sister," I said. "She would be so much fun to dress up. We could buy her jewelry and barrettes and some of those headbands Ч you know, the stretchy ones."
Dawn sat in a kitchen chair and said dreamily, "What would you want to name our sister ... or brother?"
"I don't know about a brother, but I think a beautiful name for a girl is Tara. Or Charity.
Or Bea. Isn't Bea cute? I met a little girl today named Bea. Maybe Will would be nice for a boy."
"I think Dawn and Mary Anne are lovely names."
I jumped a mile, then whirled around to see who had spoken. It was Sharon. Dawn and I had been lost in some other world, and we hadn't heard our parents come home.
"Are you two talking about babies again?" asked Dad.
"Yes," I replied.
I couldn't bring myself to say anything more, but luckily Dawn jumped into the conversation. "We've noticed a pattern," she said. "People get married, then they have babies. Or they adopt babies or children."
"Not everyone," said Sharon. "Besides, between Richard and me we already have three children. And a cat."
"But don't the two of you want to have a baby together?" I asked.
"No," Sharon answered gently. "Not at this point in our lives."
"We're happy just the way we are," added Dad.
His voice carried that final note, the one that means, "End of discussion." The one that means, "I don't want to hear another word about it."
Dawn got the message, too. "Dinner's almost ready/' she said.
So we ate dinner. No one said anything further about babies. But I couldn't stop thinking about them. Especially what to name a baby. I doodled in the margin of my math homework that evening: Tara, Lizzie, Margaret, Tara, Adele, Tara, Frannie, Tara, Charity, Bea . . .
Chapter 5.
Then Logan and I had worked out our finances for Modern Living class, we'd drawn a bunch of pretty negative conclusions: apartment rents were much higher than we'd expected; food was expensive; everything was expensive. And we could not yet be financially independent.
"What are we supposed to say in class tomorrow?" Logan asked. "Somehow, I have the feeling that 'we can't afford anything' isn't what Mrs. Boy den wants to hear. We could have told her that without doing any homework."
So Logan and I had written a two-page paper outlining how much money we earn, comparing the rents of different-sized apartments, and trying to figure out what percent of someone's salary should be spent on rent alone, and therefore how much we would need to earn to afford even the tiniest little apartment.
We made four professional-looking graphs, too. (We used Magic Markers, colored dots, rulers, even a protractor.)