Today, I spent a long time holding Chris’s cousin’s newborn son, who is just five weeks old. He spends the majority of his time sleeping, a good chunk of time feeding from his mother’s breast, and a small amount of time crying and pooping. What a life. I kept inhaling him and that incredibly fresh, powdery baby smell. Now, if only parenting could be that simple – just inhaling and enjoying the moment.

As I held this little baby in my lap, Chris’s mother remarked to Chris’s dad that it looks like I’d quickly adapt to being a mum, and I already looked like I was such a natural. Chris’s dad later pulled me aside to let me know. “As you can tell, Mum is trying to send a message,” he said with a little chuckle.

It’s easy to look like a natural when all you are doing is holding a baby when he is soundly sleeping. It’s all the crying and the poop and the sicknesses and the fussiness that terrify me right now.

This afternoon was Chris’s cousin’s engagement party. What was surprising was that her mother actually made one of the fanciest homemade cakes I’d ever seen. It was this incredibly tall, marshmallow-frosted white cake with intricate beading and lining, handmade red and white sugar flowers, and a chocolate fudge filling. The cake itself was moist throughout; I was completely blown away.

I asked Chris’s cousin’s mother how, when, and where she learned to do this type of cake making; I had no idea she had this talent. She said she hadn’t done cakes like this since all three of her daughters were young. Since she quit her job temporarily until the girls were around 5, she said she had a lot of free time after they’d go to sleep, and she got bored and missed adult conversation and interaction, so she decided to take up a hobby at the local community center, which offered cake baking and decorating classes. She became obsessed with it and started doing it all the time, and it got to a point where friends, church members, and friends of friends were asking her to make cakes for their birthdays, graduations, and even weddings, and paying her for her services.

Two things surprised me in this conversation: one, that she literally had this talent and hadn’t made a cake of this scale since the girls were that young (that’s 20+ years ago!), yet this cake still turned out immaculate and delicious; and two, that in retrospect, as a young mother she actually admitted to having a “lot” of free time, even with three children. Most parents of today think they don’t have enough time to do everything with just one child, yet Chris’s aunt thought she had too much free time and needed to consume herself with a new (and quite laborious and intensive) hobby with three freaking children and zero hired help. She said she enjoyed it, as it gave her another purpose and something else to focus on other than being a temporary stay-at-home mother, which oftentimes drove her crazy (as it probably would anyone).

That’s the thing about Chris’s family. Although they are certainly not without their own little dysfunctional bits, as every family is dysfunctional to some degree, somehow, what unites every individual in his family in my head is that every single one of them is so positive, always looking to new opportunities and ways to see the glass half full and not half empty. I’ll never stop being astounded by this.

We saw several of Chris’s friends over the course of today and ended the day at his cousin’s, where the family has just welcomed their third son a couple of weeks ago. When we were in Korea last summer, we saw a street vendor demonstrating these “pig splat” toys in a trendy shopping area in Seoul. You take this squishy orange ball with a pig face on it, slam it down on a hard surface, and the ball “splatters” on the ground, then slowly gathers itself up and becomes a ball again. We thought it would be a fun, inexpensive gift to get Chris’s cousin’s sons, so we bought two of them. As we drove to their house, I asked Chris how long he thought these balls would last, fearing that they’d barely last an hour. When we got there, the kids were so excited to play with these that they threw them constantly on the floor and on the ceiling, squeezing them to the point that both burst and even had liquid oozing out of them. It was nonstop screaming and laughing and throwing until the last little bit of liquid spilled out.

Thirty minutes. Little boys are like little monsters. I do not understand how anyone can raise three sons at once. Good luck to them.

We spent today in Sydney, where Chris needed to be for work today, and caught up with his brother, cousin, and soon to be cousin-in-law. While at dinner, Chris’s youngest cousin, who is the youngest of three girls in her family based in Melbourne, is expressing worry about her mother once the last child, her middle sister, leaves to move out to a home she purchased in another suburb of Melbourne. The oldest daughter has been living in Sydney with her now fiancé and are planning to move back next week to Melbourne, and this cousin is about to start her medical residency in a New South Wales city close to the Blue Mountains. The middle daughter has lived at home up until now and is moving out. Granted, two out of the three daughters are still living in the Melbourne area, while this cousin is living in New South Wales, which isn’t far at all by flight from Melbourne, yet she’s freaking out about how her mother will cope with all daughters being out of the house.

“Mum will be lost once B moves out,” Deb says. “When B went abroad for a few weeks a couple of years ago, Mum called me constantly, and I kept saying, ‘why are you calling me?’”

I’m wondering why this is a big deal; two out of three girls will still in Melbourne while one is in a state next door. Yes, all the girls will be out of the house for the first time, but that is inevitable with healthy, functioning adults, and it’s actually late considering the last one moving out is 27 years old. Empty nest syndrome is a common feeling, hence the name, but we move on with our lives. It’s not an unhealthy situation at all, and we should be happy when our adult children move on with their lives and stop being dependent on parents. In this dinner group, we have Chris’s brother, who moved to the other side of the world to live in Toronto for three years and is now in Sydney; Chris has been away on the East Coast of the U.S. for ten years now; I live 3,000 miles away across the country from my parents, who only have one living child left.

“But two out of three of you will still be in Melbourne, so it’s not like they’re that far from your parents,” I said. I could not believe she was freaking out about her mother coping when she’d still have two out of three of her children within short driving distance.

“I just don’t know how Mum will deal,” Deb insisted, ignoring my comment.

“Well, how do you think my parents felt about me moving here to Sydney? I’m an only child!” James responded, finally trying to burst Deb’s closed minded thinking.

It’s all relative. We all have our own problems and our own situations. But we feel them the most when they are our own situations, not the person next to us.

I was talking to my mom, and she told me that one of her close Jehovah’s Witness friends (who actually wrote me a check as a wedding gift even though she’s never even met me and was not invited to the wedding) came over to the house over the weekend to make my dad lamb. My dad loves lamb, and he occasionally made it for Ed and me growing up, which is how we both learned to love lamb. My mom, on the other hand, has always hated it and may even have an allergy to it. The one time my uncle made a lamb stew and didn’t tell my mom it was lamb, she spent the wee hours of the night vomiting into the toilet.

On the one hand, I thought it was incredibly sweet, thoughtful, and generous for her friend to come over and make lamb for my dad, who she knows loves it. On the other hand, I thought it was a little strange. She’s not that close to my mom, but she still volunteered to surprise them at their house and make them a whole lamb roast? Where does my mom find these people? I can’t even get people at my office to pay for a $10 lunch for me.