Unsolicited Advice to Third Time Parents

I was driving home from work last week with a friend of mine and his wife. They are expecting their first child this summer, and asked if I had any wisdom I could impart. I told them that the only advice I knew was don't drink and park, accidents cause babies, but that timeless bit of wisdom is too late for them.

I do, however, have some advice for third time parents.

But first, some background.

Most winter Saturday nights are movie nights for the kids. They choose a DVD or video that some of them like and others can tolerate, and then they eat macaroni on the couch while they watch the video.

Last night was slightly different. For some reason, Veev found a video of the kids from when my oldest was my only, and popped it in the VCR. The kids watched in between games of Gameboy and EA FIFA 06, while my littlest, my third, sat and watched the whole video with Veev.

After a while, My oldest was not the only one on screen, and we were treated to my oldest and middlest. They were adorable, by the way, not a word a straight man uses very often, but justified in this case. My favorite moment was when I told my oldest, who was about five in the video, that he couldn't play hockey that night because we were going out to dinner. His bright smiling face turned so sad, so quickly, and then, all of the sudden he was laughing hysterically. Did I tell him I was just kidding, did he read it on my face, or did he just cope with bad news by laughing? I don't know. I am off camera when it happens, but you don't hear me say anything.

But I digress.

When the tape ended, my littlest, who was so excited to see her older brothers as younger children, asked where she was in the video.

Uh oh.

You see, we never really taped her as a baby. She was the third kid. We don't have any professional photos of her as a baby. We don't have a baby book. We don't have really much of anything.

So she was crying because we never taped her, when I remembered that we had a DVD from a trip to Israel with her in it, and we found the scenes, and the night was saved.

So my advice to all you third time parents out there is never ever let your third child see family videos from before she was born, because she will not be on screen.

You're welcome.

NOTE: Veev claims that there is a professional picture of my littlest from when she was a baby. After searching through the pile of professional pictures we had for our oldest and the one picture we had of our middlest, Veev was able to find the professional picture of our baby as a bay