Trust me. You are not ready for this part of the story. I've seen my fair share of stressful things in my life, but I tell you, none of them are as stressful as what you're about to see. What I'm about to tell you might just put you off of getting kids for, well, a pretty long time. So, you've been warned, in case you get the idea of complaining to me. Flash and I say that it's not that hard to raise kids, but there are five kids in our family, and all of them are pretty insane at times.
So, where were we in the story? Applejack had just decided to sit down with me and ask just how tough it was to handle my own five kids. Y'know, Sunset, Trixie, Adagio, Starlight, and Moondancer. The easy part is trying to tell the story. The hard part is having to think back on it. That's what I was always told by mom and dad. And let me tell you, thinking back on babies doing baby things? There's some things that even the devil himself would shiver at.
I'll give you one of the more basic stories to start with, alright? It was just a few weeks ago when Flash was going out shopping. The usual stuff. Groceries, baby supplies, possibly some pills for the headache I was about to have, I dunno. I don't tend to keep track of all the little details; especially not with five little terrors in my life. But still, he trusted me with looking after the house and kids while he was gone. And me, being the mother of this whole ordeal, had to accept.
I had managed to get the babies all together in their little playroom/the only room in the house where they're even remotely behaving themselves and let them have some time together so I could see Flash off. I gave him a hug, a little peck on the cheek, and watched him go on his way. The SECOND his car left the driveway, things started to kick off, as the moans started echoing from the top floor. My mom mode immediately turned on and I bolted up the stairs so fast, you might as well have put me down for the Olympics.
What I saw in there was not a pleasant sight.
First of all, babies are babies, so you can't expect them to play the same way that you think most kids do. To start with, Starlight had been playing with blocks. Notice how I said 'had' there? Well, turns out, she was now trying to eat the blocks whole. They were much too big for her, but that didn't stop her from opening her mouth wide and stuffing them in there like she was diagnosed with pica or some shit. Drool was tumbling out of her mouth and it splattered all over the floor where she was trying to eat the blocks.
Then, we come to Adagio and Trixie. The two of them were both holding a giant, pink rubber ball, and violently pulling and tugging at it to keep it for themselves. Both of them yelling what I could only assume to be baby versions of all the swear words we've come to know and love as grown-ups. They pulled so hard that the ball eventually slipped out of both of their hands and their backs and heads hit the floor hard; to which they started to cry loudly about it.
Moondancer wasn't exempt from the worries either. She had been put in the playpen for her own safety, but she had somehow managed to learn how to climb with her tiny little baby body and she was trying to escape; to break out of the pen that kept her hostage, like a prisoner of a baby war. Either way, she was getting closer and closer to the top and it looked like she was about to get out, fall over, and fall down over the other side.
And then there's Sunset. While all of this chaos was going on, all of these babies whined, moaned, and tried to cause my life a living hell, Sunset was... actually, she was pretty well-behaved. She had been reading a book in the corner and cooing gently to herself while doing it. I breathed a miniscule sigh of relief when I looked at Sunset, but I couldn't say the same about all of the others. It was time for me to do what I do best—or worst, if you wanna be that pedantic about how I raise, care for, and protect my kids in comparison to yours, maybe.
First things first, Moondancer. I wasn't about to let her tumble over the side and turn her into a baby pancake. I had to run over there as fast as I could. In fact, I ran so fast that I completely didn't notice the other toys the babies had left out and I ended up stumbling over a mini ball pit, crushing a little plushie monkey underneath my unbalanced feet and landed on my face in front of the playpen that Moondancer was climbing out of. And only then did I feel Moondancer herself land on my back, followed by the little, high-pitched giggles that came out of her mouth.
"Moondancer! Why are you trying to climb out of the playpen?" I asked, probably hoping to get some kind of response out of her. God, what a stupid idiot I am, right? Who'd ever expect a normal, unassuming, barely-months-old baby to talk properly? All that I got out of her mouth was more baby nonsense that I swear getting a major in linguistics would be easier than trying to make out what in the nine hells she was saying.
Then, her cheeks puffed up and she spat all over me, making my face scrunch up. She just laughed at my misery as I just wiped my face clean and dropped her back in the playpen. "You stay there, alright?" I had to wrap her up tight in a little blanket cocoon so that she wouldn't escape. Like, y'know, the little cocoons that most people wrap their babies in? Those ones? It wouldn't surprise me if you hadn't heard of the technique before...
Anyway. One baby was taken care of. Now it was time for the other most pressing matter. Since Starlight was still taking ages to get through eating one of the blocks and doubtful that she was going to finish, I went to see how Adagio and Trixie were. As you could imagine, the two of them were thrashing around, crying and wailing like they'd broken all of the bones in their body. Actually, that's way too morbid of a description and I'm sorry about it. I was just so broken at the time, could you blame me for having such a dark cloud in my head?
Back to the matter at hand. One crying Adagio and one crying Trixie; both of which had been fighting over a pink ball. Very quickly, I took both babies up, sat my ass down, and gently started to rock them back to normal. And while that didn't stop them from crying, it did manage to calm them down a little bit. Though, for them, calming down wasn't exactly stopping the waterworks. No, their version of calming down was still to cry as loud as they could, but just stop kicking and slapping like I'm trying to hurt them or anything like that. As for the crying part? Well, no matter how much I rocked them and sang for them, the two girls would not. Stop. Crying. Seriously, if you asked me what noise I wanted to hear more in terms of babies crying or a jet engine firing right in my ears? I'd take the jet engine. Every time. At least jet engines are easier to control than these little monsters...
"Look, what if I give both of you a ball? Would that make you happy?" I tried to bargain with them, but then again, what do you expect babies to say other than 'goo goo', 'gah gah', or some other random nonsense? I just took their prolonged crying as a yes and started to look around the nursery for some more toys for them so that it'd shut the two of them up. First thing that came to mind? Balls. And not the kind of balls in the ball pit that I had so stupidly tripped over. No, I'm talking about the balls that are as big as their chests; the ones that are soft and squishy.
Sure enough, I did end up finding some balls like that over by the corner. They were different colours; one being sea-foam green and the other being orange and yellow. I know, it's kinda close to their colours, but that's not the important part here. What mattered is that they were balls, babies were going to be playing with them, and then they would stop crying and causing my ears to bleed. I decided to walk over as best as I could and try not to go too fast this time.
But I'll tell you this right now, the sound of babies crying? It makes it really hard for someone to concentrate. Like, let's say that you've got a really big assignment coming up or you're walking a tightrope in a stage show. The absolute last thing that you want in a situation like that is for some snotty, undeveloped, unpredictable infants to start crying their eyes out and shattering the silence that you need. And when I'm trying to walk my way through this minefield of baby toys and other crap, it's not that easy to do when I've got the ear-piercing wails of Adagio and Trixie accompanying me the whole way.
Still, through some miracle of science and tolerance, I was able to make it to the other end of the room and pick up the balls that they wanted. And that was when I realised that I had to go backwards and do the whole thing all over again! Gah! Ugh, still, if you wanted to see my story, I figured that I might as well leave all of the important bits in. That way, you can properly understand my pain when it comes to raising such little devils like these five. Balls were got, and now, I was making my way back over to the crying Adagio and Trixie, hoping that these balls would calm them down for real and stop them from crying even more than they already had.
And that is the moment that I got too complacent; the moment that I made my biggest mistake that day. See, because I had to go back through the toys I had just treaded and tiptoed around, going straight back to it and also seeing the crying babies in question, as well as Starlight who was still trying to see if she could eat building blocks with her miniscule mouth and lack of teeth, let's just say that I wanted this stuff to be over and done with as fast as humanly possibly. So I sped up for a brief moment, my foot touched a little building block shaped like a cylinder, I fell over, my face slamming against the floor by the two babies' feet, and the balls bounced off of their heads. And though those little balls are soft and squishy, if you were a baby, they'd be as hard as bowling balls.
So, with two rubber balls acting like bowling balls hitting Adagio and Trixie's heads, they, of course, stopped for a second or two, and then, guess what? They started to cry and shake around even more. Now, their cries were even higher-pitched and I swear that you could have used them to shatter glass. So many tears, so much body movement, it was as if I'd made a horrid mistake at some point in my life and now these babies were being used as fate's cruel way of punishing me! To which I will promptly say, 'fuck you, fate. You're not the boss of me.'
So, they cried and cried and cried. Clearly, rubber balls weren't the best toys to get them when there is literally a mess of toys all over the place. And since they were just going to keep on crying, I painstakingly threw myself on the floor, wriggled forward like some caterpillar, and ended up hugging the two of them myself, crying a little bit myself as their tears echoed and sliced up my eardrums. I had to cuddle the two of them and cry myself until they finally managed to cry themselves so much that they wore themselves out and fell asleep.
That little charade FINALLY OVER, I went to check on Starlight. I was convinced that she had managed to eat up one of the blocks during that whole ordeal. But, fortunately, she was still eating. It was as if she had become fixated on the blocks, as now, she couldn't stop trying to eat them. And all the while, the only things that came out of her mouth were the slime of her drool and the random, almost hypnotised coos of Starlight as she tried to eat. If it were anything other than building blocks and if she was doing anything other than trying to eat them, it would have been adorable. But no, she was willingly trying to eat them for whatever other reason than, 'I'm a baby. Babies don't know how to eat things when mommy and daddy don't spell it out for them'.
I left both Adagio and Trixie to sleep upset and check on Starlight, while also effortlessly removing the block from her mouth; which was now completely drenched in her gooey drool. I had to physically hold myself back from gagging over feeling the ooze-soaked block and keep myself frmo saying profanities as I looked around for something to clean it up. So, I went to the changing table and looked in the drawers for some wipes. Thankfully, I'd memorized where everything was a few days into buying this thing, so I'd at least got that down pat. The things you learn when you're preparing for/raising babies, I swear...
Anyways, building block clean-up. Not the hardest job in the whole baby-raising detail, not by a wide margin. But it still took some time, given how much Starlight had drooled and lathered the block with her saliva. Once I cleaned it up, I took it back to Starlight to cry and clean up the floor, only to see that she had stuffed another block into her mouth and was doing it all over again, making those same zombie-like coos that make me seriously believe that my baby is being mind-controlled by some dim-witted asshole that just wants to fuck with my life!
"I seriously don't wanna have to deal with drool clean-up today..." I scoffed to myself and went to pick up something that I knew would do the trick. Something else for Starlight to suck on. There was a pink and magenta pacifier nearby; something that Starlight had always loved since the day she was born, which, fair enough, isn't exactly too long, but the point is, she is a baby. Babies love pacifiers. You do the math. I yanked out the second block she was suckling on as fast as I could and jammed the pacifier in her mouth as quickly as I had freed the block. A little bait and switch. Now, Starlight was still making those noises that she was making, but now, she was sucking on something that was meant to be sucked on, and not just something that just goes in her mouth because she wants to suck on it.
"Right... Now that all of that's been taken care of, maybe I can get some peace around here..." I said, eyes twitching as I picked up Starlight, who was still suckling on the pacifier and laid her down in one of the nearby cribs. I'm sure that she didn't mind back then, given that she's just a baby who doesn't really want many things in life. As long as she was suckling on that pacifier, she didn't care whether I put her in a crib or anywhere in the world for that matter. "Now then. Let's see what the actual well-behaved little one is doing, shall we?" I said, then walked my way over to tiny little Sunset and her book.
Now, when it comes to babies, they're met with mixed feelings. Some people really, really, REALLY love babies and everything they do; no matter how much of a hassle they can be for people. The other half of people? Well, let's just say that the noises of crying babies is something that they don't wanna hear; no matter what else happens in their lives. But the one thing that we can all agree on—and I think I'm right in saying this—is that the best behaved babies are the quiet babies; the ones who just play around and don't make too much of a fuss. And for me, Sunset Shimmer is one of those babies. Most of the time, at least.
So, I sat down with Sunset for a while. I didn't say anything as she was deep into her little book. It was just a simple alphabet book with giant letters and little doodles to show off things that start with that letter. Y'know, the letter A has apples and ants on it while the letter B has bananas and bees, that sorta thing. But the thing that Sunset was doing while reading this book was talking; or at least, trying to talk. She was slapping her teeny little hands against the letters to try and say them properly, but she couldn't do it at all. Again. She's a baby. Babies can't talk, period. All they make is funny noises and try to act like they can talk. Not that it bothered her, though. Sunset just loved to read that story.
Then, she looked up and saw me looking down at her. She pulled herself from the book without hesitation and reached up for my face with her chubby little hands, making all kinds of noises as she beckoned me to pick her up. And once I did pick her up, she made a happy whine as I brought her to my lap and she cuddled against my belly, making even more baby gibberish as she and I looked into each other's eyes.
"Hi, Sunny-Wunny. Enjoying your book?" I asked. For once, I thought like I was going to have a normal conversation with my child. I heard her as she made more happy baby noises at me, reaching up for my face. I just picked Sunset up and let her cuddle my face. "Aww... isn't that sweet?" From there, I decided to let Sunset play with my face for a little bit because, well, she's well-behaved, so I can afford her some luxuries like that.
And then, as if everything else hadn't been bad enough, the worst thing happened to me. Sunset Shimmer pooped her diaper. And believe me, when a baby poops themselves, that's when all of the gloves come off. Immediately, the smell hit our noses, and the warmth in Sunset's diaper immediately made the smile melt away. She whimpered for a few seconds, then moaned, and then as loud as she could, Sunset Shimmer started to scream in ways that only a baby could. The kind of baby scream that didn't just hurt my ears, but everyone else's ears as well.
All together, as if they were all part of some symphony orchestra that was horribly out of practice and probably the lowest rated in all of the human race, the babies started wailing. All five of my own children, it didn't matter where they were, what they were doing, or whether they were laying down in their playpens or cribs or whatever, they were all crying, and all five of them needed to be calmed down. And, as I'm sure you've all guessed by now, I'm just one person. I am just one Twilight. Mother. Fucking. Sparkle. And if you think that I can calm all five of these babies down myself when they're all bawling like that? Let's just say that I'd do it, but it'd eat a good chunk out of my sanity...